> Interesting you should say that, because for years we were getting beat > up regularly about how poor our ALTER capabilities were compared to > MySQL's. Have we really passed them up in ALTER flexibility? Or is > there some other limitation you are thinking of?
I wasn't commenting on the flexibility issue, more on performance. If you add or delete a column doesn't MySQL copy the table to a temp table then delete the original one and rename the copy? Try doing that on a table with 25 million rows and you can go to dinner and a movie while you wait for it to finish. Try it on a really big table and you can go to a performance of the Ring Cycle while you're waiting. (And I mean the Wagner Ring, not Tolkien.) I didn't comment on the interactive user interfaces. While there are a few things about psql that drive me nuts (like the fact that it always does the edit to a temporary file so it goes away immediately upon exit and some of the ways \o works, I'm used to using both features in Oracle to provide a historical trail of my work), mysql can't even repeat a command (\g) without first re-editing it. -- Mike Nolan ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 7: don't forget to increase your free space map settings
