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

[Baron Schwartz]

Brent Baisley wrote:
> Yes, that will lock up the table while the change is being made. One 
> technique you can use is to rename the table and create a new to catch 
> the incoming data.
> RENAME TABLE x TO y;CREATE TABLE x LIKE y;
> 
> By putting both commands on 1 line, it will execute almost immediately.

If you create the new table first with a different name, then rename to swap the table 
names, it will be atomic (multi-table renames are atomic).  So this would avoid the 
"almost immediately" above:

create table x like y;
rename table y to z, x to y;

Baron