Almost all major oracle operations can be done online ... Index rebuilds, table reorgs etc. Depends how much hardware you have how much it affects things ...
True in this case, but not always true, the issue often isn't upgrading the schema, it's that there can be no single schema that can hold the data because it varies on a per row basis. No RDBMS can deal with this well, no matter how mature, it's just not what they're designed for. This is trivial for an OODBMS which just stores raw objects, no matter their shape.
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Indeed. This is not a RDBMS problem. Its a MySQL problem and the correct solution is to use a mature DB.
Even in Oracle, we've had to schedule downtime for a single column schema change and population for 45 minutes. I would call Oracle "mature."
Note: I wasn't involved in doing the update, so it's possible there was a better way to do it. The table is used by about 50 different applications.
Almost all major oracle operations can be done online ... Index rebuilds, table reorgs etc. Depends how much hardware you have how much it affects things ...
True in this case, but not always true, the issue often isn't upgrading the schema, it's that there can be no single schema that can hold the data because it varies on a per row basis. No RDBMS can deal with this well, no matter how mature, it's just not what they're designed for. This is trivial for an OODBMS which just stores raw objects, no matter their shape.