I have released MySQL-Sandbox 3.1.01, which is the first release after the move to GitHub. While the changes are not so spectacular (it's a minor release, with mostly bug fixes), I am pleased to see that the move has started producing collaboration. Two of the changes were provided by Daniël van Eeden and Mark Leith, who have scratched some of their own itches by providing useful patches.

All in all, this period of working with GitHub has been liberating. Although Bazaar plays with the same principles of git, it lacks most of the tools and the know-how which characterizes git. Add to this that also my team has moved Tungsten Replicator …

MySQL-Sandbox is a great tool for testing a new release, and in fact this is what I do when a new MySQL tarball becomes available. I don't think many people are aware of the full testing capabilities of the sandbox, though.
When you think about testing, you may just think of creating a sandbox with the new tarball, and then hammering it with your pet procedure. That works, of course, as the main purpose of MySQL-Sandbox is to allow you to do just that. There is, however, a full test suite that can tell you in a short while if your tarball is compatible with the past or not.
This procedure is quite strict. It has happened several times that I caught a bug in a new release of MySQL, or Percona Server, or MariaDB, just by running this suite.
How MySQL-Sandbox gets testedBefore describing how to test, I would like to show what I do. When a new version of MySQL-Sandbox is ready …

I have three pieces of information to share about MySQL::Sandbox:

• Version 3.1.0 has migrated from Launchpad to GitHub
• This version is released under the Apache license. Both these changes are meant to improve and promote cooperation on the project.
• There is an important change related to usability. When using replication with MySQL::Sandbox and MySQL 5.6+, the server UUIDs become more readable (see below).

First, some words on the location changes. About two years ago, I started plans for a rewrite of MySQL::Sandbox. Then, I had some unexpected changes, which involved moving home to a different continent twice within twelve months. The project …

Introduction: where we standPrevious episodes:

• MySQL replication monitoring 101

MySQL replication in action - Part 1: GTID & Co
In the latest releases of MySQL and MariaDB we have seen several replication improvements. One of the most exciting additions is the ability to enhance basic replication with multiple sources. Those who have used replication for a while should remember that one of the tenets of the “old” replication was that a slave couldn’t have more than one master. This was The Law and there was no escape ... until now. The only way to work around that prohibition was to use circular replication, also known …

The latest MySQL Sandbox, version 3.0.66 is out. It has a few new features (as always, when I find myself doing the same thing many times, I script it) and improved support for latest releases of MySQL. You can now install, among other versions, MySQL 5.7.8 and MariaDB 10.1.x

Some notable additions in this release are in the scripts that are created and customized for each sandbox. There are many of them and when one more arrives, it's easy to overlook it. So, here are the new arrivals.



./show_binlog
When I am troubleshooting replication behavior, I often need to inspect the latest binary log. The sandbox has a shortcut that gives me the right version of mysqlbinlog for the deployment:

I’ve had a look at a preview release of MySQL 5.7.8, some time before it became available to the general public (perks and duties of an Oracle ACE) and I found a few interesting things among the release notes and the tarball itself:

• There is a new tool named mysqlpump, which is intended as a replacement for mysqldump, with parallel processing, compression, progress watch, the long awaited ability of excluding databases or tables, and more.
• The json functionality has been fished out from the labs and added to the main distribution.

Maintaining a project like MySQL::Sandbox is sometimes tiring, but it has its advantages. One of them is that everything related to the server setup comes to my attention rather earlier than if I were an average DBA or developer.

I try to keep MySQL Sandbox up to date with every release of MySQL and (to a lesser extent) MariaDB [1]. For this reason, I am used to trying a new release with MySQL Sandbox, and … seeing it fail.

Of the latest changes in MySQL, probably the most disruptive was what happened in MySQL 5.7.6, where the mysql.user table lost the password column.

Yep. No ‘password’ column anymore. And just to make the setup procedure harder, the syntax of SET PASSWORD …

Both MySQL and MariaDB have been busy, each introducing new features, sometimes creating the same feature, often with different syntax.

This is sometimes good for users, who have a wide choice. And sometimes it is bad, as once you are used to the deployment and syntax of one flavor, it is hard to switch to a different one. This problem is enhanced if you are dealing with an application, MySQL Sandbox, that needs to work well with all flavors.

The latest releases of MySQL Sandbox (3.0.51 to 3.0.55) have been necessary to solve minor and major troublesome points with MySQL 5.7.8 and MariaDB 10.1.

The current version (3.0.55) can install all the newest releases, including replication with MySQL 5.7.8 which suffers from a compatibility bug (better explored in a separate article). …

Today Oracle released MySQL 5.7.6 milestone 16. With this, MySQL 5.7 has been in development for over 2 years.
Compared to MySQL 5.6, the changes are quite extensive. The main effort of the team has been focused on speed, with performance reportedly improved from 2 to 3 times compared to previous releases.
A full list of what is new would take too much space here, but I would like to mention some key points:

• Oracle has spent a considerable amount of energy in the improvement of MySQL security and safety. You will see many new features, but even more old features that were deprecated and more that were removed after deprecation in 5.6.
• The installation process has been changing in every …

Using MySQL Sandbox I can install multiple instances of MySQL. It is not uncommon for me to run 5 or 6 instances at once, and in some occasions, I get to have even 10 of them. It is usually not a problem. But today I had an issue while testing MariaDB, for which I needed 5 instances, and I the installation failed after the 4th one. To make sure that the host could run that many servers, I tried installing 10 instances of MySQL 5.6 and 5.7. All at once, for a grand total of 20 instances:

$ make_multiple_sandbox --how_many_nodes=10 5.6.14
installing node 1
installing node 2
installing node 3
installing node 4
installing node 5
installing node 6
installing node 7
installing node 8
installing node 9
installing node 10
group directory installed in $HOME/sandboxes/multi_msb_5_6_14
$ make_multiple_sandbox --how_many_nodes=10 5.7.4 …