I have a 250GB 500M rows MySQL table and would like to delete one of its columns. The column is VARCHAR(255). I would like to perform this operation with as little as possible down-time. Thoughts:
- Is there any configuration I can add that will help this operation?
- Would it be better to iterate in php before on each row and delete the value inside it?
- Would it require OPTIMIZE TABLE afterwards?
- What would be a reasonable time estimation for such a procedure?