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by o11c 610 days ago
From what I can tell, MySQL is supposed to be safe since 2018 if you have no data from before 2010.

The fact that you still can't use DDL in transactions makes life exceedingly painful, but it's technically safe if you write your migration code carefully enough.
2 comments
p_l 610 days ago
Some places still have columns declared as utf8 instead of utf8mb4, and there's a special place in hell for authors of the MySQL general clusterfuck regarding encodings - it was all nice and great if you didn't care about anything other than latin1 or ASCII - go outside that before utf8 option and it was horror that even experienced operators managed to fuckup (I have a badge from a Google conference in 2017 with nicely visible effect of "we have mixed up one of the three separate encoding settings in MySQL and now you have mojibake in your badge").

And then there's UTF8 not actually being UTF8, which can result in total lockup of a table if someone inputs a character that does not fit in UCS-2 and now you need to recover the database from backup and preferably convert all instances of utf8 to utf8mb4, because fuck you that's why.

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lol768 610 days ago
Yeah, the whole charset/collation design is a complete dumpster fire.
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sgarland 610 days ago
In fairness, reasoning about collations is like peering into the abyss. I get why they’re required to have so many levels of detail, and the Unicode Consortium has done a fantastic job, but to say they’re complicated is putting it mildly.
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The_Colonel 610 days ago
Lack of transactional DDL is certainly painful, but not unique for MySQL. Oracle doesn't support it either.
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tpmoney 609 days ago
Oracle also didn't support Boolean data types for a long time, and had a 20 some odd year public thread arguing that no one needed a Boolean data type (https://asktom.oracle.com/ords/f?p=100:11:0::::P11_QUESTION_...). They finally added it in Oracle 23 which is nice, but I wouldn't consider it to be in good company to be lacking something Oracle also lacks.
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The_Colonel 609 days ago
Not having a boolean data type is IMHO just an annoyance, not comparable to the lack of transactional DDL.

But to the point, people often use this point to claim that MySQL is a toy database, not usable for real world production use. I use Oracle as a counterpoint, which also has a lot of warts but is pretty much an archetype of an enterprise-grade DB engine.

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justinclift 610 days ago
Both databases are owned by the same company. Wonder if it's something inherent to the company which has keep that limitation going?
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