Table modifications are a common task for database administrators. In this blog, I’ll explain how to alter tables online in a controlled manner that does not disrupt application users or cause application downtime.
One of the tools in Percona Toolkit is pt-online-schema-change, a utility that alters the structure of a table without interfering with the reads or writes. The tool creates an empty copy of the table to alter and modify as desired before copying the rows from the original table into the new one.
When the copying is finished, it removes the original table and replaces it with the new one. Any changes made to data in the original tables during the copy process will be reflected in the new table as the tool creates triggers on …
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