Welcome to MySQL QA Episode 8: Reducing Testcases for Engineers: tuning reducer.sh

1. Advanced configurable variables & their default/vanilla reducer.sh settings
   1. FORCE_SKIPV
   2. FORCE_SPORADIC
   3. TIMEOUT_COMMAND & TIMEOUT_CHECK
   4. MULTI_THREADS
   5. MULTI_THREADS_INCREASE
   6. QUERYTIMEOUT
   7. STAGE1_LINES
   8. SKIPSTAGE
   9. FORCE_KILL
2. Some examples
   1. FORCE_SKIPV/FORCE_SPORADIC
   2. TIMEOUT_COMMAND/TIMEOUT_CHECK

Full-screen viewing @ 720p resolution recommended.

The post MySQL QA Episode 8: Reducing Testcases for Engineers: tuning …

Welcome to MySQL QA Episode #7 – Reducing Testcases for Beginners: single-threaded reducer.sh!

In this episode we’ll learn how to use reducer.sh. Topics discussed;

1. reducer.sh introduction/concepts
2. Basic configurable variables & their default reducer.sh settings
   1. INPUTFILE options
   2. MODE=x
   3. TEXT=”text”
   4. WORKDIR_LOCATION & WORKDIR_M3_DIRECTORY
   5. MYEXTRA
   6. MYBASE
   7. PQUERY_MOD & PQUERY_LOC
   8. MODE5_COUNTTEXT, MODE5_ADDITIONAL_TEXT & MODE5_ADDITIONAL_COUNTTEXT
   9. How to learn more about each of the settings
3. Manual example
4. Introduction to the script’s self-recursion concept – subreducer
5. Quick setup re-cap, details of an already executed QA run
…

Welcome to MySQL QA Episode 3: “Debugging: GDB, Backtraces, Frames and Library Dependencies”

In this episode you’ll learn how to use debugging tool GDB. The following debugging topics are covered:

1. GDB Introduction
2. Backtrace, Stack trace
3. Frames
4. Commands & Logging
5. Variables
6. Library dependencies
7. c++filt
8. Handy references
– GDB Cheat sheet (page #2): https://goo.gl/rrmB9i
– From Crash to testcase: https://goo.gl/3aSvVW

Also expands on live debugging & more. In HD quality (set your player to 720p!)

The post MySQL QA Episode 3: How to use the debugging tool GDB appeared …

Like any good, thus lazy, engineer I don’t like to start things manually. Creating directories, configuration files, specify paths, ports via command line is too boring. I wrote already how I survive in case when I need to start MySQL server (here). There is also the MySQL Sandbox which can be used for the same purpose.

But what to do if you want to start Percona XtraDB Cluster this way? Fortunately we, at Percona, have engineers who created automation solution for starting PXC. This solution uses Docker. To explore it you need:

1. Clone the pxc-docker repository:
   git clone https://github.com/percona/pxc-docker …

Welcome to MySQL QA Episode 2: Build a MySQL Server – Git, Bazaar (bzr), Compiling, and Build Tools

In this episode you’ll learn how to build Percona Server and/or MySQL Server for QA purposes & more in this short 25 minute tutorial.

In HD quality (set your player to 720p!)

To watch the other episodes in this series, see the MySQL QA & Bash Linux Training Series post. If you missed MySQL QA Episode 1, it was titled “Bash/GNU Tools & Linux Upskill & Scripting Fun.” You are watch it here.

If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below.

The post …

After we released pquery to the community, and as we started logging bug reports with pquery testcases, it quickly became clear that pquery binaries with statically compiled-in client libraries would be of great convenience, both for ourselves and for the community.

(If you haven’t heard about pquery yet, read the pquery introduction blog post, come and join the pquery introduction lightning talk at Percona Live (15 April just around 6PM in Hall A), or keep an eye out for some of the upcoming episodes in the …

MySQL QA Episode #1: Bash/GNU Tools & Linux Upskill & Scripting Fun

This episode consists of 13 parts, and an introduction. See videos below

In HD quality (set your player to 720p!)

Introduction

Part 1: echo, ls, cp, rm, vi, cat, df, du, tee, cd, clear, uname, date, time, cat, mkdir

Part 2: find, wc, sort, shuf, tr, mkdir, man, more

Part 3: Redirection, tee, stdout, stderr, /dev/null, cat

Part 4: Vars, ‘ vs “, $0, $$, $!, screen, chmod, chown, export, set, whoami, sleep, kill, sh, grep, sudo, su, pwd

Part 5: grep, regex (regular expressions), tr

Part 6: sed, regex (regular expressions)

Part 7: awk

Part 8: xargs

Part 9: subshells, …

Welcome to the MySQL QA Training Series!

If you have not read our introductory blog post on pquery yet, I’d recommend reading that one first to get a bit of background. The community is enthuastic about pquery, and today I am happy to announce a full training series on pquery and more. Whether you are a Linux or MySQL newbie or a seasoned QA engineer, there is something here for you. From Bash scripting (see episode 1 below), to every aspect of the new pquery framework, it is my hope that you enjoy this series. If you do, please leave us a comment

Database quality assurance is not as straightforward as it may seem. It’s not a matter of point-and-click, but rather of many intertwined tools and scripts. Beyond that, due to the complexity of the underlying product, it’s about having an overall plan or …

Being a QA Engineer, how would you feel if you had access to a framework which can generate 80+ crashes – a mix of hitting developer introduced assertions (situations that should not happen), and serious unforeseen binary crashes – for the world’s most popular open source database software – each and ever hour? What if you could do this running on a medium spec machine – even a laptop?

The seniors amongst you may object “But… generating a crash or assertion is one thing – creating a repeatable testcase for the same is quite another.”

Introducing pquery, mtr_to_sql, reducer.sh (the pquery-enabled version), and more:

80+ coredumps per hour. Fully automatic testcase creation. Near-100% testcase reproducibility. C++ core. 15 Seconds run time per trial. Up to 20-25k lines of SQL executed per trial. CLI testcases. Compatible with sporadic issues. High-end automation of many aspects.

It all …

Finding bugs in MySQL is not only fun, it’s also something I have been doing the last four years of my life.

Whether you want to become the next Shane Bester (who is generally considered the most skilled MySQL bug hunter worldwide), or just want to prove you can outsmart some of the world’s best programmers, finding bugs in MySQL is a skill not reserved anymore to top QA engineers armed with a loads of scripts, expensive flash storage and top-range server hardware. Off course, for professionals that’s still the way to go, but now anyone with an average laptop and a standard HDD can have a lot of fun trying to find that elusive crash…

 If you follow this post carefully, you may well be able to find a nice crashing bug (or two) running RQG …