New ideas about MySQL Sandbox at the Boston meetup

Presenting a topic to a new audience is a two ways learning experience. The attendees learn what the presenter came prepared to say, and in presence of an attentive audience, the presenter can learn something on the spot. During today's Boston MySQL meetup, I got two interesting ideas aboou how to improve MySQL Sandbox.

• Using the Sandbox as a test for the future production environment is useful. But it would be even more useful if there were a simple way of transferring the contents of a well tested Sandbox to the main server, or transferring the setup of a successfully tuned replication scheme to several production servers. Currently, this can't be done easily, but I have a few ideas worth checking.


• The Sandbox can provide one or more servers for development and tests. Every server can be created by a knowledgeable administrator. It would be useful to have a sandbox provider that can create a sandbox on the spot, with an automatic check about the port being available. So the tester can simply ask for another server of a given version, and the Sandbox will be created with a non-conflicting port. There are several ways of implementing this idea. Perhaps the easiest one, suggested by an attendee, is to register the used ports.

Both these ideas are worth exploring. If you happen to care about them and have a good idea on their implementation, please contact me, or simply comment to this post. Thanks to all the ones who have brainstormed about these issues!