Re: the grass on the other side of the hill

On Nov 9, 2006, at 10:01 AM, Vassilis Papadimos wrote:

> From http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/09/1534204
>
> "Last night we crossed over 16,777,216 comments in the database.
> The wise amongst you might note that this number is 2^24, or in
> MySQLese an unsigned mediumint. Unfortunately, like 5 years ago we
> changed our primary keys in the comment table to unsigned int (32
> bits, or 4.1 billion) but neglected to change the index that
> handles parents. We're awesome! Fixing is a simple ALTER TABLE
> statement... but on a table that is 16 million rows long, our
> system will take 3+ hours to do it, during which time there can be
> no posting. So today, we're disabling threading and will enable it
> again later tonight. Sorry for the inconvenience. We shall flog
> ourselves appropriately."
>
> Hilarious!

The lead DBA and I talked about slony when I saw him at OSCON.

Here's another post about their comment table design:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=205731&cid=16786801

-selena