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

Not really.

You ARE altering the underlying structure of the table, after all, and that's a bit of information that's quite important to the underlying system. You're also (likely) moving much of the data around on disk.

If you plan on doing this a lot, you're better off simply padding the table with "dummy" columns that are available for future use.