Vitess: Schema Changes at Scale
Talkat KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 · on Thursday, 2025-04-03· at 16:45· Platinum Suite | Level 3 | Room 1-2·
summary
Vitess performs coordinated non‑blocking schema changes by creating a shadow table, copying billions of rows while replaying binlog events, and then renaming tables across every shard; a single issued job fans out to 64 shards (or more) with idempotent job IDs and vReplication journaling so a primary crash loses minutes not days. Declarative migrations, postponed cutovers, concurrent migrations, and automated reverts let teams migrate terabyte tables serving millions of QPS with cutover skew measured in seconds, not hours, and automatic resume on failover.
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chapters (17)
- 0:00Introduction to Vitess
- 1:04What is Vitess
- 2:51Vitess architecture
- 5:25Schema changes in MySQL
- 7:54Online schema change
- 11:21Schema changes in shards
- 12:25Idempotency in migrations
- 14:17Migration status tracking
- 16:02Declarative migrations
- 17:46Schema consistency
- 20:17Cut-over timing
- 22:02Concurrent migrations
- 24:13Resiliency in clusters
- 26:00Recovery from failures
- 27:27Schema migration benefits
- 28:53Vitess roadmap
- 30:17Q&A on migrations
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