This tip may be obvious to many of you, but I just discovered it recently, and it was news to Skyler when I told him, so I’ll share it here too:
If you need to make a bunch of ALTERs to the same table, it’s much more efficient to make them all in one huge comma-delimited statement rather than running each ALTER separately.
Why? Because every time you make an ALTER, MySQL makes a new table that meets your new altered definition, copies the entire contents into it, deletes the old one and renames the new one to the name of the old one. So if you make 10 alters, MySQL will do that 10 times, but if you make one alter with 10 changes in it, MySQL will only have to copy the table once.
Skyler estimates that trick will probably save us about 10 hours when we port the old (current) database to the new schema for file/song.