How Tencent’s DBA Team Cut a 12‑Hour Schema Change to 0.04 seconds in MariaDB
The article recounts how Tencent Game DBA engineers contributed two core features—instant ADD COLUMN and large‑field compression—to MariaDB 10.3.2 Alpha, slashing a 12‑hour schema change to 0.04 seconds, earning public thanks from the MariaDB project and its founder Monty, and illustrating the impact of open‑source collaboration on high‑performance game databases.
MariaDB 10.3.2 Alpha Release Highlights
On October 10, 2017, MariaDB announced the Alpha release of version 10.3.2, explicitly thanking Tencent Interactive Entertainment DBA team for two new features integrated into the release.
Background of the Contributions
Earlier, in MariaDB 10.2.3, the same team had its features accepted and acknowledged. Six months later, the team’s work on TenDB (also known as TMySQL) added two core capabilities: fast column addition and large‑field compression, which had been used at massive scale in Tencent games since 2013.
Why These Features Matter
Traditional schema changes in large‑scale games could take up to 12 hours, causing downtime and revenue loss. By redesigning the operation at the storage engine level, the DBA team reduced the time for adding a column on a 74 GB partitioned table from 12 hours to 0.04 seconds—a speed‑up of more than one million times.
“When we upgraded the DB, the same add‑column operation finished in 0.04 seconds instead of 12 hours,” said Vinchen from the Interactive Entertainment Operations Center.
Recognition from MariaDB’s Founders
The team’s work received direct acknowledgment from MariaDB’s founder Monty and senior InnoDB developer Marko, who highlighted the instant ADD COLUMN feature as one of the most important changes in MariaDB 10.3.
“Perhaps one of the most important InnoDB changes coming in MariaDB Server 10.3 is Instant ADD COLUMN for InnoDB tables.” – Marko
Open‑Source Contribution Process
After meeting Monty in July 2016, the team prepared detailed design documents for TenDB and TenDB Cluster and submitted two pull requests to MariaDB’s GitHub repository. Both were accepted, and the features were merged into the main codebase.
Impact on the Community
The fast‑add‑column and large‑field‑compression features are now available to all MariaDB users, benefiting not only game workloads but any application with massive tables. The DBA team’s success demonstrates how practical performance challenges can drive valuable open‑source innovations.
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