MariaDB lockless schema changes?

Question

I've heard a few folks mention that mariadb schema updates are or can be lockless. Other than an anonymous mention in the comments of this page, I can't find any references. We have a very large table we're going to update, and were wondering if others had experience with this.

We're going to test this soon, and I'll report back, but I was hoping to find more official sources for this.

Answer 1

MariaDB does support ALTER ONLINE, but it's not fully implemented, or well-documented on the site yet (https://mariadb.com/kb/en/alter-table/). It's been present since MariaDB 5.3, but is still in the process of being ported in MariaDB 10. So it depends on what version you're running, and you'd need to check to see whether it could handle your situation.