在不锁定表的情况下更改表?

When doing an ALTER TABLE statement in MySQL, the whole table is read-locked for the duration of the statement. If it's a big table, that means insert or update statements could be locked for a looooong time. Is there a way to do a "hot alter", like adding a column in such a way that the table is still updatable throughout the process?When doing an ALTER TABLE statement in MySQL, t