One of the best things that can happen to a piece of software is for people to actually use it.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have received feedback on the tool from several members of both the Percona and Drizzle teams.  The most common and strongly emphasized comments were in regards to what a terrible, terrible name dbqp really is in terms of saying, seeing, and typing it ; )

As that isn’t something that can be disputed (it’s really annoying to use in conversations *and* to type several dozen times a day), the project has been renamed to kewpie.  For those that follow such things, I did present on …

So I’m back from the Percona dev team’s recent meeting.  While there, we spent a fair bit of time discussing Xtrabackup development.  One of our challenges is that as we add richer features to the tool, we need equivalent testing capabilities.  However, it seems a constant in the MySQL world that available QA tools often leave something to be desired.  The randgen is a literal wonder-tool for database testing, but it is also occasionally frustrating / doesn’t scratch every testing itch.  It is based on technology SQL Server was using in 1998 (MySQL began using it in ~2007, IIRC).  So this is no knock, it is merely meant to be an example of a poor QA engineer’s frustrations ; )  While the current …

Just wanted to blog about some of the latest updates to dbqp.  We just merged some interesting changes into Drizzle (just in time for the impending Fremont beta).  In additional to general code cleanup / reorganization, we have the following goodies:

Randgen in the Drizzle tree

One of the biggest things is that the random query generator (aka randgen) is now part of the Drizzle tree.  While I did some of the work here, the major drivers of this happening were Brian and Stewart:

1. Brian makes a fair argument …

One of the long term testing goals for Drizzle is to move all of our test logic directly in-tree.  Currently, we use a system called drizzle-automation to execute a variety of tests for our staging branch.  This is the final set of tests patches must pass before being allowed to merge into Drizzle trunk and includes things like sysbench, dbt2, the randgen, etc.  With the development of dbqp, we can now move this testing logic directly into the tree (and even move some of the testing tools there as well).  Of course, I’ve rambled on about this before, but I personally think it is cool and useful ; )  However enough of the sales pitch, on to the new modes!

sysbench mode

With but a simple incantation of ./dbqp –mode=sysbench [–suite=readonly|readwrite], you too can invoke the mighty sysbench configurations that we use to ensure …

Why would one want to do this, you may ask?  Well, for starters, it makes a great ‘canary-in-the-coal-mine‘ in regards to backwards compatibility!

For Drizzle, we’ve created some tables (via the randgen’s data generator if you are curious), saved a copy of the datadir, and then created a test case that uses said datadir for the test server.  The test executes some simple SQL queries to make sure we can read the tables properly.  This way, if we ever do something to either the server or .dfe format (data format exchange – had a most enlightening conversation with the team about …

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 …