In the previous post about the dbdeployer recipes we saw the basics of using the cookbook command and the simpler tutorials that the recipes offer.

Here we will see some more advanced techniques, and more demanding examples.

We saw that the recipe for a single deployment would get a NOTFOUND when no versions were available, or the highest MySQL version when one was found.

$ dbdeployer cookbook  show single | grep version=
version=$1
[ -z "$version" ] && version=8.0.16

But what if we want the latest Percona Server or MariaDB for this recipe? One solution would be …

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 …

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 …

Version 0.3.0 of dbdeployer has gained the ability of deploying multiple sandboxes concurrently. Whenever we deploy a group of sandboxes (replication, multiple) we can use the --concurrent flag, telling dbdeployer that it should run operations concurrently.

What happens when a single sandbox gets deployed? There are six sets of operations:

1. Create the sandbox directory and write down its scripts;
2. Run the initialisation script;
3. Start the database server;
4. Run the pre-grants SQL commands (if any;)
5. Load the grants;
6. Run the post-grants SQL commands (if any;)

When several …

How it happened

A few years ago I started thinking about refactoring MySQL-Sandbox. I got lots of ideas and a name for the project (dbdeployer) but went no further. The initial idea (this was 2013!) was to rewrite the project in Ruby: I had been using Ruby at work and it looked like a decent replacement for Perl. My main problem was the difficulty of installation in an uncontrolled environment. If you have control over your environment (it's your laptop or you are in charge of the server configuration via Puppet or similar) then the task is easy. But if you ever need to deploy somewhere with little or no notice, it becomes a problem: there are servers where Perl is not installed, and is common that the server also have a policy forbidding all scripting languages from being deployed. …

In my previous post, we saw the usage of MySQL Group Replication (MGR) in single-primary mode. We know that Oracle does not recommends using MGR in multi-primary mode, but there is so much in the documentation and in presentations about MGR behavior in multi-primary, that I feel I should really give it a try, and especially compare this technology with the already existing multiple master solution introduced in 5.7: multi-source replication.

Installation

To this extent, I will set up two clusters using MySQL-Sandbox. The instructions for MGR in …

MySQL-Sandbox installs the MySQL server in isolation, by rejecting existing option files using the option --no-defaults. This is usually a good thing, because you don't want the initialization to be influenced by options in your /etc/my.cnf or other options files in default positions.

However, such isolation is also a problem when you need to add options during the initialization. One example is innodb-page-size, which can be set to many values, but only if the server was initialized accordingly. Thus, you can't set innodb-page-size=64K in your configuration file because the default value is different. It would fail, as InnoDB would conflict.

…

MySQL-Sandbox 3.1.11 introduces a new utility, different from anything I have put before in the MySQL Sandbox toolkit.

make_sandbox_from_url downloads a tiny MySQL tarball from a repository and install it straight away.

As of today, the following packages are available

MySQL Sandbox 3.1.07 adds several options to execute shell or SQL commands during the sandbox installation.

Figure 1: MySQL Sandbox states and where you can run the hooks

There are 3 options to run shell commands, 2 to run SQL queries, and 2 to run SQL files.

## Shell commands
--pre_start_exec=command  : runs 'command' after the installation, before the server starts
--pre_grants_exec=command : runs 'command' after the server starts, before loading the grants.
--post_grants_exec=command : runs 'command' after the loading the grants.

## SQL statements
--pre_grants_sql=query : runs 'query' before loading the grants.
--pre_grants_file=filename : runs SQL file 'filename' before loading the grants.
--post_grants_sql=query : runs 'query' …

Previous episodes:

• MySQL-Docker operations. - Part 1: Getting started with MySQL in Docker.
• MySQL-Docker operations. - Part 2: Customizing MySQL in Docker.
• MySQL-Docker operations. - Part 3: MySQL replication in Docker.

We're going to explore the choices and the differences between various types of deployments. We will consider four use cases:

1. [Friendly]: Testing an application on a server where a different version of the same application is already installed (examples: a Python app requiring many …