[dragonwriter]

The upthread comparison was to PostgreSQL (which fully supports transactional DDL), not Oracle (which does not.)

(Oracle 11g R2 provides something like Transactional DDL via Edition Based Redefinition. MS SQL has partial support for transactional DDL; PostgreSQL, DB2, Firebird, Informix, and Sybase Adaptive Server all support Transactional DDL [1].)

[1] http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Transactional_DDL_in_Postgre...

[pyre]

True but Oracle owns MySQL. If their flagship product doesn't have it, are they going to put in the effort to add it to their free offering?

[VLM]

A conspiracy theory would be putting an intentionally buggy one in their free offering. It would have to be buggy by design such that it would be incompatible with a later patch. Then put non buggy design 2.0 in the paid product. Perhaps the inability to design a bad design like that is why that scenario hasn't been initiated. Sometimes it is hard to think of intentionally bad code, although it seems easy enough to generate when I'm trying to write good code.