So the traditional measures of database scalability have to do with query speed. Does your database run queries quickly enough? Do you have contention issues when one thread is trying to insert data and another is trying to run some kind of crazy five table join. One problem I’ve run into with large MySQL databases is what I’ll call, for lack of a better term, maintenance scalability.
Let’s say I need to index a column in a table with three million rows. The create index statement can take 20 or 30 minutes to run. Same thing if I need to add a new column to a large table. So how do people get around these maintenance scalability issues without downtime? In the MySQL world, is there an answer to this question?