We had a giant table that constantly needed schema changes. With older versions of MySQL, adding a column meant many hours of downtime. And our business require

We had a giant table that constantly needed schema changes. With older versions of MySQL, adding a column meant many hours of downtime. And our business required 100% uptime. It wasn't a good fit. The promise of no schema sounded awesome. MySQL 5.6 no longer has this limitation. Actually, pretty much everything we didn't like about MySQL has been fixed in 5.6. We kind of decided to give it another chance and we've been happy.