online database migrations

[erfanium]

Can i use goose as a alternative tool to https://github.com/github/gh-ost? will goose ever support online database migrations?

[mfridman]

Kind of, it really depends on your scale and needs. The gh-ost tool is quite useful when you have extremely large data sets and you need to migrate data in a non-blocking manner, I think the blog post described it quite nicely:

Adding/changing/removing columns and indexes etc., are blocking operations with the default MySQL behavior. We conduct such schema changes multiple times per day and wish to minimize user facing impact.

I don't think we have plans to add this functionality into goose, at least not anytime soon.

ps. My personal take is most applications don't have the concerns GitHub was trying to solve, so most migration tools are usually fine. YMMV :)