So while I was at the MySQL UC, The Xeround database came to my attention.  It bills itself as database as a service for MySQL systems and a seamless replacement for standard MySQL.

Of course, since I am a QA Engineer, I could not resist the urge to try to break it >:)  As my friend and former MySQL colleage, Kostja says, “QA Engineers are a unique breed…they like to push all the buttons” : )  I would say that the QA mindset goes a bit further than that, but it is something I will delve into in another post.  I will only say that there is a reason that Microsoft recognizes QA software engineering as a distinct and specialized discipline.

So, let’s get back to Xeround.  It was the first database as a service that caught my eye and I just had to test it!  They are currently offering a

My presentation from the MySQL UC didn’t give a lot of detail on the actual tool I have hacked up, nor did it go into how to play with it / try it out.  I figured I should rectify that (at least one person seemed interested in trying it out <g>)

To begin with, you should have the random query generator installed (see the docs for handling that).  Besides being *the* cutting edge, production-ready testing tool in the open-source dbms world, it comes with a handy data generator.

One of the key features of kewpie, is that it can easily generate test queries against any test bed.  A standard randgen practice is to develop grammars and gendata files (which generates a user-specified test-bed) that are designed to work

So, back when we released our first beta in September, one of the many responses was this

The comments about the reliability / durability of the log definitely struck me as testing we needed.

It’s taken a while (we had this GA thing we were working on…), but we finally have crash and recover testing of the innodb transaction log and the slave plugin.

Here is what happens for the innodb-based log:

• Set up the test servers and start the randgen with the trx_log grammars.  I’ll point you to my superhuman colleague, Andrew