Twice a day, I run a heavy query and save the results (40MBs worth of rows) to a table. 

I truncate this results table before inserting the new results such that it only ever has the latest query's results in it. 

The problem, is that while the update to the table is written, there is technically no data and/or a lock. When that is the case, anyone interacting with the site could experience an interruption. I haven't experienced this yet, but I am looking to mitigate this in the future.

What is the best way to remedy this? Is it proper to write the new results to a table named `results_pending`, then drop the `results` table and rename `results_pending` to `results`?