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

If you cannot afford downtime for your database when doing application updates you should consider maintaining a two-node cluster for high availability. With a simple replication setup, you could do almost fully online structural changes like the one you suggest:

• wait for all changes to be replicated on a passive slave
• change the passive slave to be the active master
• do the structural changes to the old master
• replicate changes back from the new master to the old master
• do the master swapping again and the new app deployment simultaneously

It is not always easy but it works, usually with 0 downtime! The second node does not have to be only passive one, it can be used for testing, doing statistics or as a fallback node. If you do not have infrastructure replication can be set up within a single machine (with two instances of MySQL).