MySQL is no joke
If you were around back in the day you will remember the MySQL team claiming that no one needed transactions or referential integrity, that you should just do it yourself in the application...
If you were around back in the day you will remember the MySQL team claiming that no one needed transactions or referential integrity, that you should just do it yourself in the application...
ORMs and ActiveRecord in particular encourage, to some extent, the use of a RDBMS, even if they didn't get to take advantage of them well for a long time - for example, in RoR "has_one / has_many" for foreign-key relationship, .joins(:field_name) for, well, joins, and so on.
A big reason I called out RoR is that back in '04-05 I was railing against its default use of plural table names, and DHH on IRC recommended I shut up and just flip the configuration switch and turn off the feature, but of course when I did that all sorts of latent bugs were exposed.
RoR was the beginning of hipster "coding" and I therefore blame it for everything.
I'm wasn't previously familiar with the FriendFeed approach to database (ab)use. I paid about as much attention to it as I did to MySpace back in the day -- nearly zilch -- so its etc innards are doubly obscure to me.
> MySQL was the perfect database for people who had no respect for databases.
Very few database systems support online DDL, which unlike a transaction, does not require undo or rollback resources. Of course one must have a rollback procedure if something fails, but you need one for transactions too, just in case.
An online rollback is far lest costly than a transactional rollback, because and online rollback is just undoing what you did. Added a column you didn't want in one query? Remove it again in another, very quickly.
TokuDB (a mysql/mariadb storage engine) supported all DDL as an online operation. But percona killed it in favour of TokuMX, the MongoDB equivalent.
TokuMX has no upgrade path to wired tiger, only one major customer at Percona (I can't say who it is) and no engineers.
Any kind of DDL is tricky and requires users to RTFM for the intricacies of their chosen database. One size rarely fits all.
I really wish Percona would reconsider their decision to deprecate it.
After Percona took over TokuDB's creator TokuTek, they wasted so much of their development time and money on TokuMX (Percona's fractal tree-enabled MongoDB server) only to abandon it in 2017.
That money would have been better spent on TokuDB development to allow it to match the features present in InnoDB like generated columns, spatial indexing, fulltext Indexes and Galera.
TokuDB still has many users and MyRocks is just no substitute.