Running ALTER TABLE migrations on multi-terabyte MySQL tables historically caused thread contention, lock exhaustion, and replication lag due to synchronous database triggers. gh-ost solves this as GitHub's open-source, triggerless online schema migration tool. By streaming row-based binlog events as an external replica, gh-ost enables non-blocking, pausable DDL migrations with atomic cutovers. #MySQL #ghost #DatabaseArchitecture #DevOps #SRE #DBA #GitHub #DataEngineering #FinOps #SysAdmin