[evanelias]

My thoughts exactly. It's surprising that external online schema change tools for Postgres have only become a thing fairly recently! The only two I'm aware of are:

* pgroll: Written in Golang, first commits June 2023. https://github.com/xataio/pgroll

* pg-osc: Written in Ruby, first commits Dec 2021. https://github.com/shayonj/pg-osc

Meanwhile over in the MySQL and MariaDB ecosystem, external OSC tools have been around for quite some time, starting with oak-online-alter-table over 15 years ago. The most popular options today are pt-online-schema-change or gh-ost, but other battle-tested solutions include fb-osc, LHM, and the latest entry Spirit.