MySQL 4.1

[Bradley Baetz]

On Thu, Jan 23, 2003 at 10:51:23PM +0000, Gervase Markham wrote:
> >In fact, it's a downright pain in the ass with PgSQL; minor version number
> >upgrades (7.1 -> 7.2) require full dumps/restores of the database, and any
> >complex table changes require... badness. This is probably because either
> >a) the Postgres documentation is so bad, I'm doing something wrong, or b)
> >they use triggers and other "real DB fu", so it's more difficult than in
> >MySQL.
> 
> If this were true, this would suck mightily - Bugzilla's entire upgrade 
> strategy (checksetup.pl) relies on being able to tweak the schema.

This has been fixed in version 7.3. You can even 'drop' columns without
needing a full copy of the db, and clean up later at your conviencence.
(DROP COLUMN is basically like oracle's ALTER TABLE ... SET UNUSED)

The only extra thing we need is that to delete an index you need to know
its name. Our current CREATE INDEX clauses don't name it, so we get a
system generated one. It is possible to find out the index name from teh
columns, but that involves poking at system tables in 7.3 whch changes
from release to release, so we probably want to avoid that...

Bradley