Is there a way to rename a column on an InnoDB table without a major alter?
The table is pretty big and I want to avoid major downtime.
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Is there a way to rename a column on an InnoDB table without a major alter?
The table is pretty big and I want to avoid major downtime.
Renaming a column (with
ALTER TABLE ... CHANGE COLUMN) unfortunately requires MySQL to run a full table copy.Check out pt-online-schema-change. This helps you to make many types of ALTER changes to a table without locking the whole table for the duration of the ALTER. You can continue to read and write the original table while it’s copying the data into the new table. Changes are captured and applied to the new table through triggers.
Example:
Update: MySQL 5.6 can do some types of ALTER operations without rebuilding the table, and changing the name of a column is one of those supported as an online change. See http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/innodb-create-index-overview.html for an overview of which types of alterations do or don’t support this.