When I designed dbdeployer, I wanted to eliminate most of the issues that the old MySQL-Sandbox had:

• dependencies during installation
• mistaken tarballs
• clarity of syntax
• features (un)awareness.

Dependencies during installation did go away right from the start, as the dbdeployer executable is ready to be used without additional components. The only dependency is to have a host that can run MySQL. There is little dbdeployer can do about detecting whether or not your system can run MySQL. It depends on which version and flavor of MySQL you are running. It should not be a big deal as I assume that anyone in need of dbdeployer has already the necessary knowledge about MySQL …

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A great way to install MySQL when you need to do quick tests is to use a sandbox tool. This allows you to perform all the installation steps with a single command making the whole process very simple, and it allows for automation of the test. Giuseppe Maxia (also known as the Data Charmer, @datacharmer on Twitter) has for many years maintained sandbox tools for MySQL, first with MySQL Sandbox and now with dbdeployer.

One of the most recent features of dbdeployer is the support for MySQL NDB Cluster. In this blog, I will take …

I remember wanting to create MySQL Cluster sandboxes several years ago. By then, however, MySQL-Sandbox technology was not flexible enough to allow an easy inclusion, and the cluster software itself was not as easy to install as it is today. Thus, I kept postponing the implementation, until I started working with dbdeployer.

I included the skeleton of support for MySQL Cluster since the beginning (by keeping a range of ports dedicated for this technology, but I didn’t do anything until June 2018, when I made public my intentions to add support for NDB in dbdeployer with issue #20 (Add support for MySQL Cluster)). The issue had just a bare idea, but I needed help from someone, as my expertise with …

This was not on the radar. I have never been proficient in Galera clusters and related technologies, and thus I hadn’t given much thought to Percona Xtradb Cluster (PXC), until Alkin approached me at FOSDEM, and proposed to extend dbdeployer features to support PXC. He mentioned that many support engineers at Percona use dbdeployer) on a daily basis and that the addition of PXC would be welcome.

I could not follow up much during the conference, but we agreed on making a proof-of-concept in an indirect way: if several nodes of PXC can run in the same …

After a conference, when I take stock of what I have learned, I usually realise that the best achievements are the result of interacting with other attendees during the breaks, rather than simply listening to the lectures. It might be because I follow closely the blogosphere and thus the lectures have few surprises in store for me, or perhaps because many geeks take the conference as an excuse to refresh dormant friendships, catch up with technical gossip, and ask their friends some questions that were too sensitive to be discussed over Twitter and have been waiting for a chance of an in-person meeting to see the light of the day.

I surely had some of such questions, and I took advantage of the conference to ask them. As it often happens, I got satisfactory …

This is a quick reminder that on Thursday (tomorrow) there there is a Madrid MySQL Users Group Meeting where Giuseppe Maxia will be presenting dbdeployer to us. More information can be found here. Do not forget to sign up if you are interested. We look forward to seeing you there.

The post Reminder: Madrid MySQL User Group Meetup presenting dbdeployer on Thursday in Madrid first appeared on Simon J Mudd's Blog.

When maintainng any piece of software, we usually deal with two kind of actions:

• bug fixing,
• new features.

bugs and features

A bug happens when there is an error in the software, which does not behave according to the documentation or the specifications. In short, it's a breech of contract between the software maintainer and the users. The promise, i.e. the software API that was published at every major version, is broken, and the software must be reconciled with the expectations and fixed, so that it behaves again as the documentation says. When we fix a bug in this way, we increment the revision number of the software version (e.g. 1.0.0 to 1.0.1. See semantic …

MySQL 8.0 GA is right around the corner. I don't have precise information about its release, as I don't work at Oracle. If I did, I would probably know, but I couldn't tell when the release is scheduled to appear because of company policies. I can, however, speculate and infer, based of my experience with previous releases. My personal assessment is that the release will appear before 9:00am PT on April 24, 2018. The "before" can be anything from a few minutes to one week in advance.
Then, again, it may not happen at all if someone finds an atrocious bug that needs to be fixed asap.

Either way, users are keen on testing the new release in its current state of release candidate. Here I show a few methods that allow you to have a taste of the new …

dbdeployer went into release candidate status a few weeks ago. Since then, I added no new features, but a lot of tests. The test suite now runs 3,000+ tests on MacOS and a bit more on Linux, for a grand total of 6,000+ tests that need to run at least twice: once with concurrency enabled and once without. I know that testing can't prove the absence of bugs, but I am satisfied with the results, since all this grinding has allowed me to find several bugs and fix them.

In this framework, I felt that dbdeployer could exit candidate status and get to version 1.0. This happened on March 26th. An immediate side effect of this change is that from this point on, dbdeployer must adhere to the semantic versioning principles:

A version number is made of Major, Minor, and Revision. When changes are applied, the following happens:

…

The latest release of dbdeployer is possibly the last one with a leading 0. If no serious bugs are found in the next two weeks, the next release will bear a glorious 1.0.

Latest news

The decision to get out of the stream of pre-releases that were published until now comes because I have implemented all the features that I wanted to add: mainly, all the ones that I wished to add to MySQL-Sandbox but it would have been too hard:

• …