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0 pointscrazygringo13d ago0 comments

Because what do you do if rows are being inserted in the original table, while the new table is having rows copied over? You'll get missing rows.

You can only do the DROP TABLE trick if you know nothing else is writing to the table at the same time. You know if that's the case, according to your business logic. The database has no idea.

The DROP TABLE trick effectively bypasses all the normal guarantees of data consistency. This is why it's so fast. But you have to know that that's a safe thing to do for your data.

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nostrademons13d ago· 1 in thread

There are ways the DB could recover the data consistency guarantees, eg. keeping a log of operations that came in while the table was being copied over and then applying the relevant ones afterwards.

The tricky part is that the latency characteristics of these operations would be pretty surprising and unintuitive. It has the same problems as virtual memory and mark/sweep GC; sometimes, depending on system state and things that other threads are doing, an unrelated operation might block for very long time periods and give you huge user-visible pauses. It's often better to force these expensive operations to be explicit so that the developer has to think through the latency & consistency implications and make the tradeoffs they want.

convolvatron13d ago

except in this particular case, as long as you don't exhaust resources, mvcc kind of lets you get away with making a transactionally consistent copy under the covers without blocking anyone, since its a big-ol read.

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