ALTER TABLE without locking the table?

Question

When doing an ALTER TABLE statement in MySQL, the whole table is read-locked (allowing concurrent reads, but prohibiting concurrent writes) for the duration of the statement

Answer 1

Percona makes a tool called pt-online-schema-change that allows this to be done.

It essentially makes a copy of the table and modifies the new table. To keep the new table in sync with the original it uses triggers to update. This allows the original table to be accessed while the new table is prepared in the background.

This is similar to Dems suggested method above, but this does so in an automated fashion.

Some of their tools have a learning curve, namely connecting to the database, but once you have that down, they are great tools to have.

Ex:

pt-online-schema-change --alter "ADD COLUMN c1 INT" D=db,t=numbers_are_friends