Lack of interest Schema changes for large tables should support MySQL/MariaDB "instant add" columns

[Xon]

Modern versions of MySQL and MariaDB support "instant add" columns, but this have restrictions.

Generally only if the columns are appended to the table, and limitations on if it is nullable or not.

One limitation is you need to add indexes separately from the columns which can be "instantly added".

Ref;

MySQL :: MySQL 8.0 Reference Manual :: 15.1.9 ALTER TABLE Statement

dev.mysql.com

MySQL :: MySQL 8.0 Reference Manual :: 17.12.1 Online DDL Operations

dev.mysql.com

Instant ADD COLUMN for InnoDB

Instantly add a new column to a table

mariadb.com

InnoDB Online DDL Overview

All about online DDL operations with InnoDB.

mariadb.com

 

[Xon]

This suggestion brought to you by ~20 minutes on bare-metal modern hardware with a very good NVMe SSD to add the XF2.2 xf_post changes vs ~6 minutes to add the thread_id_score_date index after "instant add" of the type_data/vote_score/vote_count columns on a VM on a vastly slow SSD.