Optimizing MySQL for ALTER TABLE of InnoDB

Question

Sometime soon we will need to make schema changes to our production database. We need to minimize downtime for this effort, however, the ALTER TABLE statements are going to

Answer 1

I really don't know how to optimize that, but it's usually a good practice to put the site in offline mode before doing such updates.

Then, you can run your DB scripts at, say, 3 am, so it shouldn't matter much if downtime's a big longer than ideal.