strong_migrations VS ghost_adapter

In the Rails world, the gem strong_migrations can be used to detect these: https://github.com/ankane/strong_migrations

The docs include a handy articulation of fixes.

gem "strong_migrations" - https://github.com/ankane/strong_migrations | Helps devs write non-blocking migrations, a must-have.

Frameworks will have a preferred solution. We use Rails with the strong_migrations gem which is great: https://github.com/ankane/strong_migrations

There’s no real way to test, but you can use gems like https://github.com/ankane/strong_migrations and not allow to merge branches unless they are up-to-date with main.

The strong migrations gem in Rails alerts when you're trying to make a migration that may be dangerous. Does anyone know an alternative for Javascript? Or maybe for raw SQL.

Half of the problems in this article are migration related.

I am extremely grateful that some people have created awesome libraries like strong migrations https://github.com/ankane/strong_migrations. Even if you are not using rails, bookmark its readme, it is an awesome cheat-sheet when writing a migration.

I would suggest taking a look at strong migrations[1]. It's a rails project, but the readme does a great job explaining what it checks for and what safe alternative to use instead. I still link to their explanations in PRs for non-rails projects.

[1]: https://github.com/ankane/strong_migrations#checks

At least for Rails there are several gems available (ie https://github.com/WeTransfer/ghost_adapter or https://github.com/departurerb/departure) that seamlessly hook into the existing migration system and will run all eligible migrations through gh-ost or pt-osc as needed. You're right that it's not free but it isn't all that far off either.

That said, online schema migrations are a specialized tool designed for very big tables that take hours to run an ALTER TABLE on. If all your tables are small enough that alterations take less than a second or so, don't bother and just block the table for a bit. It's fine.

https://github.com/WeTransfer/ghost_adapter integrates gh-ost with activerecord and the departure gem does the same but for pt-osc.