While working on a recent support issue as a Percona Support Engineer, I got one question from a customer asking how to monitor ALTER TABLE progress. Actually, for MySQL 5.5 and prior versions, it’s quite difficult to ALTER the table in a running production environment especially for large tables (with millions records). Because it will rebuild and lock the table affecting the performance as well as our users. Therefore even if we start ALTER it’s really important to know when it will finish. Even while creating the index, ALTER TABLE will not rebuild the table if fast_index_creation is ON but still it might lock the table.
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