MySQL 5.6 offers the groundbreaking online DDL operations for InnoDB. Most common use cases will enjoy this feature, and the need for online alter table scripts will decrease. This is a killer feature!
I’ve put this new feature to the usability test. How did it go? Not too well, I’m afraid.
[Updates to this text inline], also see this followup.
sakila & DDL
sakila is still a very useful database. I say “still” because it is not very large, and computing power is getting stronger; yet on my laptop some operations can still take many seconds to complete, which is just fine for my tests.
Sakila tables are mostly InnoDB, and rental being the largest, I do:
node1 (sakila) > alter table sakila.rental engine=InnoDB; Query OK, 16044 rows affected (6.94 sec) Records: 16044 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0
So what can be executed during these 6.94 seconds? In a second terminal, I try the following: Continue reading » “Experimenting with 5.6 InnoDB Online DDL (bugs included)”