News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:MySQL - Do Not Pass This Way Again by rosser on Saturday January 26, 2013 @08:53PM (#5122706)
To be fair, there are cases where schema changes in PostgreSQL require re-writing the table, too. Like, for example, when you change the data type of an existing column.

Otherwise, you're good, though.

Re:MySQL - Do Not Pass This Way Again by saurik on Saturday January 26, 2013 @09:41PM (#5122827)
Yes, but that case comes up less often and isn't what I see NoSQL people complaining about ;P. (Also, when I've listed that as an explicit caveat recently, I often get corrected that they changed the ramifications of that recently, and it only sometimes has to happen, so I figured I'd just explicitly list the situations where you clearly should never have needed to rewrite the table.)

Generally, though, this is related to be able to do table changes under transaction locks: I have often enjoyed being able to, under an atomic transaction, replace a table with a view over that table, or make modifications to indexes and columns that I then rollback if there's a mistake.

Re:MySQL - Do Not Pass This Way Again by kconor on Saturday January 26, 2013 @09:39PM (#5122823)
To be fair, if you want to change the datatype of data in a NoSQL system, you have to rewrite it as well.
Re:MySQL - Do Not Pass This Way Again by jeltz on Sunday January 27, 2013 @01:02AM (#5123298)
Actually that depends on which change you do. varchar(2) -> varchar(4) does not require a rewrite while text -> int and varchar(4) -> varchar(2) does.