Do you think Quality Assurance (QA) is more than the simplistic view of bug hunting? Do you believe that QA is important to the entire software development lifecycle and want to focus on failure testing, process and performance control, as well as best practice adoption? Do you enjoy doing performance benchmarks and noticing regressions? Do you like to write about it, from internal reports to external blog posts?

Then why not take up a challenge at Codership, the makers of Galera Cluster, as we are looking for a Galera Cluster QA Engineer (job description at link).

We’re looking for someone who is able to work remotely, join a company meeting at least once per year, be comfortable with the use of Slack and email (asynchronous communication, for developing our virtually synchronous replication solution!), but most importantly enjoy testing the …

What does Anton Ego – a fictional restaurant critic from the Pixar movie Ratatouille – have to do with MySQL 8.0 GA?

When it comes to being a software critic, a lot.

In many ways, the work of a software critic is easy. We risk very little and thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to read and write.

But what about those who give their many hours of code development, and those who have tested such code before release? How about the many people behind the scenes who brought together packaging, documentation, multiple hours of design, marketing, online resources and more?

And all of that, I might add, is open source! Free for the world to take, copy, adapt and even incorporate in full or in part into their own open development.

It is in exactly that area that the …

Percona’s Technical Director of Quality Assurance Roel Van de Paar shares his findings on the quality of MySQL 8.0.3 RC.

On 21 September 2017, our upstream friends at Oracle released MySQL 8.0.3 RC as the first MySQL 8.0 Release Candidate.

I tested the MySQL 8.0.3 Release Candidate branch with selected Percona bugfixes applied and built it as debug using the pquery QA framework (freely available here). Percona releases Percona Server for MySQL – an improved fork of the MySQL server – with additional features and bug patches.

Any QA engineer would enjoy seeing the many bugs discovered:

================ [Run: 079328] Sorted unique issue strings (11258 trials executed, …

This post discusses the next MySQL development milestone: MySQL 8.0.1.

From the outset, MySQL 8.0 has received plenty of attention. Both this blog (see the MySQL 8.0 search) and other sites around the Internet have covered it. Early reviews seem positive (including my own MySQL 8.0 early bugs review). There is plenty of excitement about the new features.

As for early feedback on MySQL 8.0, Peter Zaitsev (Percona CEO) listed a set of recommendations for benchmarking MySQL 8.0. I hope these get reviewed and implemented. …

This blog post will look at seven bugs in MySQL 8.0.

Friday afternoon is always ideal for a quick look at the early quality of MySQL 8.0! Last Friday, I did just that.

If you haven’t heard the news yet, MySQL 8.0 DMR is available for download on mysql.com!

Tools to the ready: pquery2, updated 8.0 compatible scripts in Percona-qa and some advanced regex to wade through the many cores generated by the test run. For those of you who know and use pquery-run.sh, this should mean a lot!

[09:41:50] [21492] ====== TRIAL #39308 …

Welcome to the final – but most important – episode in the MySQL QA Series.

In it, I present my vision for all MySQL Quality Assurance – for all distributions – worldwide.

Episode 13: A Better Approach to all MySQL Regression, Stress & Feature Testing: Random Coverage Testing & SQL Interleaving

1. pquery Review
2. Random Coverage Testing
3. SQL Interleaving
4. The past & the future

Presented by Roel Van de Paar. Full-screen viewing @ 720p resolution recommended

Interested in the full MySQL QA Series?

The post MySQL Quality Assurance: A Vision for the Future by Roel Van de Paar (Final Episode 13) appeared first on MySQL Performance Blog. …

My server is crashing… Now what?

This special episode in the MySQL QA Series is for customers or users experiencing a crash.

1. A crash?
   1. Cheat sheet: https://goo.gl/rrmB9i
   2. Sever install & crash. Note this is as a demonstration: do not action this on a production server!
      sudo yum install -y http://www.percona.com/downloads/percona-release/redhat/0.1-3/percona-release-0.1-3.noarch.rpm
      sudo yum install -y Percona-Server-client-56 Percona-Server-server-56
      sudo service mysql start
2. Gimme Stacks!
   1. Debug info packages (can be executed on a production system, but do match your 5.5, 5.6 or 5.7 version correctly)
      sudo yum install -y Percona-Server-56-debuginfo
   …

Today’s episode is all about Valgrind – from the pro’s to the con’s, from the why to the how! This episode will be of interest to anyone who is or wants to work with Valgrind on a regular or semi-regular basis.

1. Pro’s/Why
2. Con’s
3. How
   1. Using the latest version
      sudo [yum/apt-get] install valgrind
      #OR#
      sudo [yum/apt-get] remove valgrind
      sudo [yum/apt-get] install bzip2 glibc*
      wget http://valgrind.org/downloads/valgrind-3.10.1.tar.bz2
      tar -xf valgrind-3.10.1.tar.bz2; cd valgrind-3.10.1
      ./configure; make; sudo make install
      valgrind –version # This should now read 3.10.1
   2. VGDB (cd ./mysql-test)
      ./lib/v1/mysql-test-run.pl –start-and-exit –valgrind –valgrind-option=”–leak-check=yes”
      –valgrind-option=”–vgdb=yes” …

Welcome to the 10th episode in the MySQL QA series! Today we’ll talk about reproducing and simplifying: How to get it Right.

Note that unless you are a QA engineer stuck on a remote, and additionally difficult-to-reproduce or difficult-to-reduce bug, this episode will largely be non-interesting for you.

However, what you may like to see – especially if you watched episodes 7 (and possibly 8 and 9) – is how reducer automatically generates handy start/stop/client (cl) etc. scripts, all packed into a handy bug tarball, in combination with the reduced SQL testcase.

This somewhat separate part is covered directly after the introduction (ends at 11:17), as well as with an example towards the end of the video (starts at time index 30:35).

The “in between part” (11:17 to 30:35) is all about reproducing and simplifying, which – unless you are working on a remote case – can likely be skipped by …

Welcome to MySQL QA Episode 9. This episode will go more in-depth into reducer.sh: Reducing Testcases for Experts: multi-threaded reducer.sh

We will explore how to use reducer.sh to do true multi-threaded testcase reduction – a world’s first.

Topics:

1. Expert configurable variables & their default reducer.sh settings
   1. PQUERY_MULTI
   2. PQUERY_MULTI_THREADS
   3. PQUERY_MULTI_CLIENT_THREADS
   4. PQUERY_MULTI_QUERIES
   5. PQUERY_REVERSE_NOSHUFFLE_OPT

Full-screen viewing @ 720p resolution recommended.

The post MySQL QA Episode 9: Reducing Testcases for Experts: multi-threaded reducer.sh appeared first on …