Normally I like to use the OS’s package manager to manage the software on my system. This ensures that things are done consistently. When managing MySQL I’d also like to manage all my instances the same way. That makes life easier for me but also for my fellow DBAs and sysadmin colleagues.

I use CentOS and the rpm packages it provides and these work quite well. However, the MySQL rpms do not allow me to manage single and multiple instances alike and while mysqld runs as the mysql user the instance management needs to be done as root (stopping, starting instances, or default access). If you want to run multiple instances you can also use mysqld_multi, but that’s not the default setup.

So this is not ideal. While this may not be much of an issue if you manage a single server, if you manage tens or …

This is far from deeply technical but little things that should be simple but aren’t annoy me. I found that MySQL Sandbox --prompt_prefix and --prompt_body don’t “just work.” I wanted the prompt to be mysql \v> . So I tried:

make_sandbox_from_source /mysql/src/mysql-4.0.30 single --prompt_body=' \v> '
sh: -c: line 0: syntax error near unexpected token `newline'
sh: -c: line 0: `make_sandbox /mysql/src/mysql-4.0.30/4.0.30 --prompt_body= \v> '

Maybe my shell knowledge is more terrible than I realize so I verified that ‘ \v> ‘ does not need special escaping:

echo ' \v> '
\v>

Ok, so clearly it’s the fault of make_sandbox_from_source. I tried and tried to do this on the command line but …

So, you’ve emailed MySQL Support, they’re working on the problem you’re having. How are they working? What tools do they use? Well, here’s my list:

• IRC – All MySQL Support Engineers work on IRC, it’s our main communication medium. While you’re only getting emails from one Engineer, it’s quite likely they’re consulting with several others at the same time. Many pairs of eyes catch all of the details.
• MySQL Docs, Changelogs, Knowledge Base, Google, etc – There’s a lot of information out there, far too much for any one person to keep in their head at once. So, we have extensive documentation that everyone can access, plus the Knowledge Base available to customers. Also, given that MySQL is a very open project, we have plenty of community members who write about their experiences.
• MySQL Sandbox …