Consider tools like pt-online-schema-change https://www.percona.com/doc/percona-toolkit/3.0/pt-online-schema-change.html https://www.percona.com/doc/percona-too

Consider tools like pt-online-schema-change https://www.percona.com/doc/percona-toolkit/3.0/pt-online-schema-change.html https://www.percona.com/doc/percona-toolkit/3.0/pt-online-sc... or gh-ost they can rebuild the table live.. they also can add indexes without too much of performance impact. I would not use VIEW as you suggest but using partitions and partitioning data by year or something can often make sense - if most of your queres specify date range.