Gh-ost Alternatives

gh-ost reviews and mentions

• Features I Wish Postgres Had but MySQL Already Has
  2 projects | dev.to | 26 Jun 2025

  If your table doesn't have foreign keys, you can use GitHub's trigger-less gh-ost, otherwise, Percona's trigger-based pt-online-schema-change is also a battle-tested solution.

• "At GitHub we do not use foreign keys, ever, anywhere"
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Jan 2024
• How Modern SQL Databases Are Changing Web Development - #3 Better Developer Experience
  4 projects | dev.to | 8 Dec 2023

  I’ve been through multiple incidents where everything worked fine in the testing environment but ended up locking the production database for minutes when deployed. A category of open-source tools called OSC (Online Schema Change) exists to mitigate such pain, like gh-ost used by GitHub and OSC used by Meta. They work by creating a set of "ghost tables" to apply the migrations, copy over old data from the original tables, and catch up with new writes simultaneously. When all old data is migrated, you can trigger a cutover to make the "ghost tables" production. Check the post below for a great introduction and comparison:

• We migrated to SQL. Our biggest learning? Don't use Prisma
  11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Oct 2023

  Sounds like it's basically explained in the gh-ost readme https://github.com/github/gh-ost#how

  I think it amounts to "use views to decouple access to the table with a fixed interface" and "use triggers for migrating data between tables"

• Ask HN: Is PostgreSQL better than MySQL?
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Apr 2023

  Gh-ost is the new hotness. Simple to use and lots of great features: https://github.com/github/gh-ost

• My Green/blue AWS db deployment strategy for avoiding data loss due to table locks
  1 project | /r/devops | 21 Mar 2023

  If the performance of the db is a concern during migrations (locking, high cpu consumption for large writes) there are tools that can help and do similiar to what your describing but with the benefit that they are battle tested tools. This one spring to mind https://github.com/github/gh-ost there are other options as well and its worth reading the trade off docs

• Changing column from longtext to mediumtext taking over 2 hours
  3 projects | /r/mysql | 4 Nov 2022

  Not sure which version of MySQL you're using, but one approach would be to use a tool like pt-online-schema-change (from Percona) or g-host -- which will create a duplicate table and then swap it in place of the original table. It's a safer approach when operating in production environments. Here's a good comparison of the tools many people use https://planetscale.com/docs/learn/online-schema-change-tools-comparison

• Ask HN: Do you use foreign Keys in Relational Databases
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Sep 2022

  No, especially on large tables with billions of records. They make online schema changes impossible. More details: https://github.com/github/gh-ost/issues/331#issuecomment-266...

• Migrating a production database without any downtime
  1 project | dev.to | 13 Aug 2022

  Tip #4: Consider slow-running migrations. Some tables can be so large that the traditional migration way is simply not a viable option for them. In such cases, you can consider embedding the data migration code right into your application, or use a special utility like GitHub's online schema migration for MySQL. A slow-running migration can work in production for days or even weeks. It gradually converts the data by small chunks, so you can carefully balance the load on the database while making sure that it doesn't cause slowness or downtime.

• How do you handle RDS schema migrations?
  1 project | /r/aws | 27 May 2022

  GitHub gh-ost

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  www.saashub.com | 12 Jun 2026

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