I wanted to do some experimentation with Percona XtraDB Cluster (Galera) and I didn't want to use virtual machines. I'm already using MySQL Sandbox for many other projects so that's the natural choice.

I've downloaded the tarball for Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.5.29 and I've extracted it to ~/opt/mysql/5.5.29-pxc.

Then I've installed 3 nodes:
make_sandbox 5.5.29-pxc -- --sandbox_port 4551 \
--sandbox_directory msb_5_5_29-pxc01 

make_sandbox 5.5.29-pxc -- --sandbox_port 4552 \
--sandbox_directory msb_5_5_29-pxc02 

make_sandbox 5.5.29-pxc -- --sandbox_port 4553 \
--sandbox_directory msb_5_5_29-pxc03 

But when I try to start a node this error happens:
130327 14:21:03 [Note] WSREP: wsrep_load(): loading provider library '/home/dvee
den/mysql/5.5.29-pxc/lib/libgalera_smm.so'















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Giuseppe Maxia of Continuent and long time creator of MySQL Sandbox.

Only works on Unix-like servers. Works with MySQL, Percona & MariaDB servers. MySQL server has the data directory, the port and the socket – you can’t share these.

To use it: make_sandbox foo.tar.gz. Then just do ./use.

$SANDBOX_HOME is ~/sandboxes. You can also create ~/opt/mysql/ and if you have MySQL 5.0.91 binary in that directory, you can just do “sb 5.1.91″.

Sandbox has features to start replication systems as well. You can have varying master/slave setups with varying versions as well (good idea to test from MySQL -> MariaDB master->slave for migration).

You can now also play with

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The aims of this kind of blog post is simple – I want to help keep the masses informed as to what’s happening with MariaDB, as a whole. There is a community growing, and MariaDB is a community project, not necessarily a Monty Program Ab baby (and we’re clear on this distinction: think of it like Canonical/Ubuntu). So, think of it as such that I’m sharing the good news, and summarising what’s been happening, to save you time.

MariaDB added to the Debian/Ubuntu wishlists
One of MariaDB’s goals is that it should be easily available for download. While we provide binaries and source at

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A few days back MariaDB announced their first GA release (see Released: MariaDB 5.1.42), so it is time to start testing it and there is not better way to test any MySQL version in a control environment other than MySQL Sandbox. However Sandbox relies on the fact that the tarball and tarball target directory are prefixed with mysql, which is not true with MariaDB. So here are the 2 tricks I had to use to make it work out of the box.

These steps are explained to create a single sandbox, the tips can be extrapolated to any other configuration. Also, I am trying to avoid renaming any files and/or directories as to leave the packages as close to the original as possible.

Step 1: Use A Symlink For The


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Normally I like to use the OS’s package manager to manage the software on my system. This ensures that things are done consistently. When managing MySQL I’d also like to manage all my instances the same way. That makes life easier for me but also for my fellow DBAs and sysadmin colleagues.

I use CentOS and the rpm packages it provides and these work quite well. However, the MySQL rpms do not allow me to manage single and multiple instances alike and while mysqld runs as the mysql user the instance management needs to be done as root (stopping, starting instances, or default access). If you want to run multiple instances you can also use mysqld_multi, but that’s not the default setup.

So this is not ideal. While this may not

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