Re: Before I shoot myself in the foot...

[Baron Schwartz]

Hi Brian,

Brian Dunning wrote:
> ...if I add a column to a table with 40,000,000 records, will it cause 
> that table to hang for any significant amount of time, and prevent other 
> transactions? It's a MyISAM table and I was going to add a varchar(20) 
> column, NULL. It's a very busy table, constant searches and inserts.

Yes, definitely.  If you look up the ALTER TABLE documentation it will explain the 
details -- I think all SELECTs will continue to run okay, but INSERTs will wait until 
the ALTER is done, then they will be applied to the altered table.

But don't hold me to that :-)

Baron