Skip to content
This repository


Subversion checkout URL

You can clone with HTTPS or Subversion.

Download ZIP

online schema change tool

Fetching latest commit…

Cannot retrieve the latest commit at this time

Large Hadron Migrator Build Status

Rails style database migrations are a useful way to evolve your data schema in an agile manner. Most Rails projects start like this, and at first, making changes is fast and easy.

That is until your tables grow to millions of records. At this point, the locking nature of ALTER TABLE may take your site down for an hour or more while critical tables are migrated. In order to avoid this, developers begin to design around the problem by introducing join tables or moving the data into another layer. Development gets less and less agile as tables grow and grow. To make the problem worse, adding or changing indices to optimize data access becomes just as difficult.

Side effects may include black holes and universe implosion.

There are few things that can be done at the server or engine level. It is possible to change default values in an ALTER TABLE without locking the table. The InnoDB Plugin provides facilities for online index creation, which is great if you are using this engine, but only solves half the problem.

At SoundCloud we started having migration pains quite a while ago, and after looking around for third party solutions, we decided to create our own. We called it Large Hadron Migrator, and it is a gem for online ActiveRecord migrations.


The Large Hadron collider at CERN

The idea


The Large Hadron is a test driven Ruby solution which can easily be dropped into an ActiveRecord migration. It presumes a single auto incremented numerical primary key called id as per the Rails convention. Unlike the twitter solution, it does not require the presence of an indexed updated_at column.


Lhm currently only works with MySQL databases and requires an established ActiveRecord connection.

It is compatible and continuously tested with Ruby 1.8.7 and Ruby 1.9.x, ActiveRecord 2.3.x and 3.x as well as mysql and mysql2 adapters.


Install it via gem install lhm or add gem "lhm" to your Gemfile.


You can invoke Lhm directly from a plain ruby file after connecting ActiveRecord to your mysql instance:

require 'lhm'

  :adapter => 'mysql',
  :host => '',
  :database => 'lhm'

Lhm.change_table :users do |m|
  m.add_column :arbitrary, "INT(12)"
  m.add_index  [:arbitrary_id, :created_at]
  m.ddl("alter table %s add column flag tinyint(1)" %

To use Lhm from an ActiveRecord::Migration in a Rails project, add it to your Gemfile, then invoke as follows:

require 'lhm'

class MigrateUsers < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    Lhm.change_table :users do |m|
      m.add_column :arbitrary, "INT(12)"
      m.add_index  [:arbitrary_id, :created_at]

  def self.down
    Lhm.change_table :users do |m|
      m.remove_index  [:arbitrary_id, :created_at]
      m.remove_column :arbitrary)

Table rename strategies

There are two different table rename strategies available: LockedSwitcher and AtomicSwitcher.

For all setups which use replication and a MySQL version affected by the the binlog bug #39675, we recommend the LockedSwitcher strategy to avoid replication issues. This strategy locks the table being migrated and issues two ALTER TABLE statements. The AtomicSwitcher uses a single atomic RENAME TABLE query and should be favored in setups which do not suffer from the mentioned replication bug.

Lhm chooses the strategy automatically based on the used MySQL server version, but you can override the behavior with an option:

Lhm.change_table :users, :atomic_switch => true do |m|
  # ...


We'll check out your contribution if you:

  • Provide a comprehensive suite of tests for your fork.
  • Have a clear and documented rationale for your changes.
  • Package these up in a pull request.

We'll do our best to help you out with any contribution issues you may have.


The license is included as LICENSE in this directory.

Similar solutions

Something went wrong with that request. Please try again.