I pledged, in my first post last month, that SkySQL will do its part to promote the best of MySQL and its community. Given the recent discovery that Oracle is no longer publishing test cases for bug fixes, and the dialogue surrounding it, it feels like the right time to share my thoughts on what this means to the open source collective, and what we can do – and are doing – about it.

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One of the tools we use to qualify MySQL Server is the Random Query Generator (RQG for short). This is an SQL generator (and more) to test database systems such as MySQL. I plan to post more on that later.

The RQG is an open source tool written in Perl, and is available on Launchpad. Up until now the RQG documentation has been part of the MySQL Forge wiki. As you may have seen from this blog post, MySQL Forge is going away soon (August 1st). Unlike other parts of the Forge wiki, the Random Query Generator documentation has moved to github, and will continue to be maintained by the RQG community:

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Devopsdays Mountainview sold out in a short 3 hours .. but there's other events that will breath devops this summer.
DrupalCon in Munich will be one of them ..

Some of you might have noticed that I`m cochairing the devops track for DrupalCon Munich,
The CFP is open till the 11th of this month and we are still actively looking for speakers.

We're trying to bridge the gap between drupal developers and the people that put their code to production, at scale.
But also enhancing the knowledge of infrastructure components Drupal developers depend on.

We're looking for talks both on culture (both success stories and failure) , automation,
specifically looking for people talking about drupal deployments , eg using tools like Capistrano, Chef, Puppet,
We want to hear where Continuous Integration fits in your deployment , do you do Continuous Delivery of a drupal environment.
And how do you …

The Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2012 is over. Together with the SkySQL solutions day, it has kept me occupied for 4 full days, from early morning to late at night.

I have to say that I am pleased. The quality of the organization was very high, with a very good lineup of speakers and an excellent technical support.

As usual, I have learned a lot during this week, either directly, by attending talks, or indirectly, by meeting people who told me what was juicy at the talks that I had missed. And I have met new interesting people, and caught up with the people that I know already.

This conference was particularly intense also because I got myself involved in 5 talks, which was probably more than I should have. How did I end up with such a task? It's a long story. …

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 …

So while I was at the MySQL UC, The Xeround database came to my attention.  It bills itself as database as a service for MySQL systems and a seamless replacement for standard MySQL.

Of course, since I am a QA Engineer, I could not resist the urge to try to break it >:)  As my friend and former MySQL colleage, Kostja says, “QA Engineers are a unique breed…they like to push all the buttons” : )  I would say that the QA mindset goes a bit further than that, but it is something I will delve into in another post.  I will only say that there is a reason that Microsoft recognizes QA software engineering as a distinct and specialized discipline.

So, let’s get back to Xeround.  It was the first database as a service that caught my eye and I just had to test it!  They are currently …