I am on my way to Argentina, where I will be speaking at the MySQL NoSQL & Cloud Conference & Expo.

I have two talks: one on my pet project MySQL Sandbox and one on replication between MySQL and MongoDB (using another project dear to me, Tungsten Replicator.

It’s my first visit to Argentina and I will try to look around a bit before the conference. And I look forward to see many ex colleagues and well known speakers at the conference. The lineup includes speakers from Percona, EffectiveMySQL, PalominoDB, MariaDB, SkySQL, Tokutek, and OpenStack.

I am looking forward to this trip. My presentation on MongoDB replication is a first for me, and I am always pleased when I can break new ground. I have the feeling that the networking is …

MySQL Sandbox is growing old

The MySQL Sandbox project has been around for 8 years, and it has gained considerable attention from the community. I have seen it mentioned in books and articles, used in other projects, and widely adopted by testers and bug reporters.
I have used it for more than testing, and it has saved me many hours of labor by allowing me to create database servers in a few seconds.
Yet, I have gathered a long list of grievance about it, both from my own experience and from other users feedback. Here goes.

• MySQL Sandbox is not easy to install. For people used to install Perl modules, it feels natural. For experienced Perl users, installing it in user space without root access is …

MySQL Sandbox has been updated again. The latest version is 3.0.38, which was just released. There were four releases in the space of one week, and this last one is just a polished edition.

Cherry-picking from the Change log:

• Added option --bind_address to complement the effects of --remote_access;
• The script 'enable_gtid' (for MySQL 5.6 +) now is durable. Previously the changes did not survive a restart.
• Now you can install MariaDB with its bizarre version '10.0'
• It also works well with MySQL 5.7. A bug prevented the creation of 'enable_gtid', but it …

A few years ago, I used MySQL Sandbox to filter binary logs. While that one was a theoretical case, recently I came across a very practical case where we needed to provision an Oracle database, which is the designated slave of a MySQL master.

In this particular case, we needed to provision the Oracle slave with some auditing features in place. Therefore, mass load functions were not considered. What we needed was the contents of the MySQL database as binary rows i.e. the same format used for row-based replication.

To achieve the purpose as quickly and as painlessly as we could, I thought to employ the services of a MySQL Sandbox. The flow of information would be like this:

1. Install a sandbox, using the same version and character set of the master;
…

Wanting to give away the pass at all costs, Shlomi then published a new post, …

The latest releases of MySQL Sandbox, in addition to deal with minor bugs, have mostly been necessary because of compatibility issues in MySQL, both 5.5 and 5.6.

When I found that MySQL 5.6 has some InnoDB tables inside the 'mysql' schema, I had to change the way that the sandbox used to remove all contents (the ./clear command.)

To achieve a smooth clean up, MySQL Sandbox now performs a dump of the mysql schema, and uses that saved data to restore the schema after a complete wipeout.

Unfortunately, when 5.5.30 was released, this operation resulted in a warning, due to a behavioral change.

After a careful change, and about 1200 unit tests, the latest version of …

MySQL 5.6 seems to be ready for GA. I have no inside information about it, but from some clues collected in various places I feel that the release should not be far away. Thus, it's time for some serious testing, and for that purpose I have worked at updating MySQL Sandbox with some urgent features.

I have just released MySQL Sandbox 3.0.28, with more support for MySQL 5.6. Notably in this release, there is suppression of MySQL 5.6 annoying verbosity, additional suppression of more annoying warnings ( actually a bug) when using empty passwords on …

One of the surprises of MySQL 5.6 was that the mysql.host table was missing. How did I realize it? Because make_sandbox, the basic installation brick of MySQL Sandbox failed to complete. What happened is that MySQL Sandbox, before claiming success, checks if some key elements are available. One of such elements is the 'host' table, which, unbeknown to me, had been deprecated, and was eventually removed in yesterday's release. As a result, installation of MySQL 5.6.7 fails.

The fix is quite easy, and I released it today. It is available in MySQL Sandbox 3.0.26, which you can get from Launchpad and CPAN.

This fix is minimal because it barely allows you to install MySQL 5.6. However, there are additional issues …

The Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2012 is over. Together with the SkySQL solutions day, it has kept me occupied for 4 full days, from early morning to late at night.

I have to say that I am pleased. The quality of the organization was very high, with a very good lineup of speakers and an excellent technical support.

As usual, I have learned a lot during this week, either directly, by attending talks, or indirectly, by meeting people who told me what was juicy at the talks that I had missed. And I have met new interesting people, and caught up with the people that I know already.

This conference was particularly intense also because I got myself involved in 5 talks, which was probably more than I should have. How did I end up with such a task? It's a long story. …

Today I tried to make incremental backups of a MariaDB instance in a MySQL sandbox with Percona XtraBackup.
I used the recently released XtraBackup 2.0. And of course there is documentation about making incremental backups. 

MySQL sandbox makes it easy to run many different MySQL versions on one machine. It does this by changing the port number, data directory, UNIX socket location and a whole lot more.

So I first started with a full backup and after that I used that backup as a base for the incremental backups. To do that I had to specify the port number which is 5522 and the username and password for the msandbox account. As MySQL uses a UNIX socket instead …