Twenty four years, ten DB migrations, zero downtime (opens in new tab)

Twenty four years. Ten DB migrations. Zero downtime. Except the first one, where I lost seven minutes I couldn't accept. That seven minutes is why this article exists. The seven minutes It was in the mid-2000s. I was running a content distribution system on my own, with a small open-source database underneath. The platform was growing, and at some point we decided to move to a much larger commercial database — an appliance-grade one, the kind you specify by line of business and not by hostnam...