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

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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
…

Let me start by saying a big “thank you” to the staff at Oracle for deciding to open source reducer.sh. It’s a tool I developed whilst I was working for them several years ago. Its sole purpose is to do one thing – but do it good: test-case simplification.

So, let’s say some customer just sent you 120,000 lines of SQL code and affirms that “it definitely causes a crash.” Or maybe you ran RQG (the Random Query Generator) for awhile (with the general query log turned on) and now you have a nice SQL trace which may just lead to that crash the run resulted in. Or you’re a DBA testing the company’s usual queries with Valgrind, and noticed that 2 in 1000 queries give a Valgrind warning in the mysqld error log – you’re just not sure which one. Or maybe you’re a developer, and during testing you saw that a SELECT query output did not look the way it should – the output was “7″ where it should have been “5″ – the …