Are you sure? Based on the official blog post¹, the INSTANT algorithm is new to MySQL 8.0. The manual of MySQL 5.6 indeed doesn't show any "Instant" option in t

Are you sure? Based on the official blog post¹, the INSTANT algorithm is new to MySQL 8.0. The manual of MySQL 5.6 indeed doesn't show any "Instant" option in the list of column operations². AFAIK, previous to MySQL 5.6, the fastest algorithm was INPLACE, which copies the data. ¹=https://mysqlserverteam.com/mysql-8-0-innodb-now-supports-instant-add-column/ https://mysqlserverteam.com/mysql-8-0-innodb-now-supports-in... ²=https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/innodb-online-ddl-operations.html https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/innodb-online-ddl-op...