Will "alter table" force table rebuild?

[Franklin Schmidt]

I am curious if doing an "alter table" on a Falcon table will cause the table to be rebuilt. I am currently using InnoDB and doing an "alter table" on an InnoDB table cause the table and all of its indexes to rebuilt, which is really completely pointless since InnoDB's secondary indexes use the primary key to refer to records, so doing something like adding a column should have no effect on them. I just watched Jim Starkey's presentation at:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1929002440950908895

and here he brings up the issue that changing metadata shouldn't force one to take a web app down for hours. This is the issue I have now, that changing the structure of a big table in my database takes hours. So I am looking at Postgres as an alternative because I see no solution with MySQL. (Postgres also lets me run Java in the database, which is great.)

I hadn't heard of Jim Starkey before today, but having read some of his stuff on the Web, my feeling is that he is right about everything, while MySQL is wrong about almost everything. Database vendors in general seem completely unconscious of what developers really need. I am sure Falcon will be great, but if a MySQL layer sits on top of it enforcing nonsensical database philosophy, Falcon will be useless to developers.