Last week I had the pleasant opportunity of introducing and discussing the operation of online schema migrations to MySQL’s engineering managers, as part of their annual meeting, in London.
Together with Simon J. Mudd of Booking.com, we discussed our perception of what it takes to run online schema migrations on a live, busy system.
While the Oracle/MySQL engineers develop new features or optimize behavior in the MySQL, we of the industry have the operational expertise and understanding of the flow of working with MySQL. In all topics, and in schema migration in particular, there is a gap between what’s perceived to be the use case and what the use case actually is. It is the community’s task to provide feedback back to Oracle so as to align development to match operations need where possible.
Our meeting included the following:
Need for schema migrations
We presented, based on our experience in current and past companies, and based on our friends of the community’s experience, the case for online schema migrations. At GitHub, at Booking.com and in many other companies I’m familiar with, we continuously deploy to production, and this implies continuous schema migrations to our production databases. We have migrations running daily; sometimes multiple per day, some time none. Continue reading » “Discussing online schema migrations with Oracle’s MySQL engineering managers”