Optimisation: adding multiple fields to same model should attempt to run single ALTER TABLE statement

[Peter Lauri]

Origin: ​https://groups.google.com/d/msg/django-users/DDekrNgXH2U/k1un-e8CbnMJ

When adding multiple fields to a Model the makemigrate and migrate does not attempt to create one ALTER TABLE statement, but rather one per field added. This can cause slow migrations of large tables.

I propose to optimise to attempt to merge multiple AddField to one single ALTER TABLE request when the migrate is run.

My real world case the db backend was MySQL, here is PG example of 2nd migration db output after adding two fields to one model.

  Applying play.0002_auto_20150122_1825...DEBUG ALTER TABLE "play_play" ADD COLUMN "field2" varchar(100) NULL; (params [])
DEBUG (0.000) ALTER TABLE "play_play" ADD COLUMN "field2" varchar(100) NULL; args=[]
DEBUG ALTER TABLE "play_play" ALTER COLUMN "field2" DROP DEFAULT; (params [])
DEBUG (0.000) ALTER TABLE "play_play" ALTER COLUMN "field2" DROP DEFAULT; args=[]
DEBUG ALTER TABLE "play_play" ADD COLUMN "field3" varchar(100) NULL; (params [])
DEBUG (0.000) ALTER TABLE "play_play" ADD COLUMN "field3" varchar(100) NULL; args=[]
DEBUG ALTER TABLE "play_play" ALTER COLUMN "field3" DROP DEFAULT; (params [])
DEBUG (0.000) ALTER TABLE "play_play" ALTER COLUMN "field3" DROP DEFAULT; args=[]

[Peter Lauri]

Some ideas here: ​https://github.com/peterlauri/django/tree/ticket_24203

[Tim Graham]

Could you give some performance numbers for comparison?

[Peter Lauri]

Replying to timgraham:

Could you give some performance numbers for comparison?

I can provide this when I'm back from vacation in two weeks (13th of February), I don't have access to the db for the moment.

[Markus Holtermann]

On PG it is recommended (in the docs iirc, but can't find a link) to add a column with null=True, promote the row values for existing rows and drop the not null constraint. This way adding the column is instant and thus no need to join multiple AddField operations.

On MySQL <5.6 the ADD COLUMN operations are expensive in any case independent from NULL or NOT NULL afaik.

On SQLite, well, it's SQLite. It's slow anyways and doesn't support adding multiple columns at once.

I have no clue about Oracle's behavior.

That said, I'm not sure this is really necessary but keep the issue open for your feedback.

[Simon Percivall]

Replying to timgraham:

Could you give some performance numbers for comparison?

I can give performance numbers for a MySQL installation.

Doing an ALTER TABLE on a table with 120 columns and containing approx. 20M rows takes 2–3 hours. Combining several ALTER TABLES into one takes no longer time.

The simple math here is that three Django migrations would take 6–9 hours, whereas the combined version would take 2–3 hours.

[Peter Lauri]

Replying to timgraham:

Could you give some performance numbers for comparison?

This is not from production, it contains ~500k rows. I will try it out on PG as well, just need to prep some data.

mysql> select count(*) from thetable;
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
|   489484 |
+----------+
1 row in set (0.07 sec)

mysql> ALTER TABLE thetable ADD COLUMN field2 varchar(100) NULL;
Query OK, 489484 rows affected (2 min 29.05 sec)
Records: 489484  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 0

mysql> ALTER TABLE thetable ADD COLUMN field3 varchar(100) NULL;
Query OK, 489484 rows affected (2 min 10.82 sec)
Records: 489484  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 0

mysql> ALTER TABLE thetable ADD COLUMN field4 varchar(100) NULL, ADD COLUMN field5 varchar(100) NULL;
Query OK, 489484 rows affected (2 min 24.92 sec)
Records: 489484  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 0

mysql>

[Peter Lauri]

Replying to timgraham:

Could you give some performance numbers for comparison?

I prepped a DB with some fields and 500k rows. The alter table statements as in my original description executed each in few milliseconds. No significant improvement to execute them in a single statement.

ballongen=# select count(*) from testtable;
 count
--------
 500000
(1 row)

Time: 34.261 ms
ballongen=# ALTER TABLE "testtable" ADD COLUMN "field2" varchar(100) NULL;
ALTER TABLE
Time: 56.649 ms
ballongen=# ALTER TABLE "testtable" ALTER COLUMN "field2" DROP DEFAULT;
ALTER TABLE
Time: 2.563 ms
ballongen=# ALTER TABLE "testtable" ADD COLUMN "field3" varchar(100) NULL;
ALTER TABLE
Time: 1.165 ms
ballongen=# ALTER TABLE "testtable" ALTER COLUMN "field3" DROP DEFAULT;
ALTER TABLE
Time: 0.240 ms

[Adam Johnson]

+1

I spend a large amount of time rewriting the SQL output from django migrations to combine the ALTER TABLE statements for each table into one, just so they can pass on our production database (MySQL, 30GB, hundreds of millions of rows).

Actually I normally use ​pt-online-schema-change for tables of any size, since it's 0 downtime, but it's still a pain to rewrite all the SQL into a single ALTER.

[Peter Lauri]

Please note that in my comment #7 (https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/24203#comment:7) I forgot to mention this was for PostgreSQL.

[ambivalentno]

Regarding timings:
InnoDB table with 2 mln entries (but lots of big TextFields).
It takes ~3 hours to add a single field, and also ~3 hours to add multiple fields in case they're grouped via single sql statement. Actually, most of time it takes to perform a migration mysql copies data to temporary table.