MySQL-Sandbox 3.1.01 - First release after the change

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 to Github, and with that I found myself all of a sudden free of old revision control systems, and master of my own time.

Back to MySQL-Sandbox: while its enhancements may not amount to much, it helped me to discover several bugs in MySQL, some of which were addressed and solved quickly. So, I have had a deeper relationship with the community, with the experience of being at both ends of the collaboration ops.

The last notable piece of news about this release is that it has been tested with the latest and greatest available: a preview of MySQL 5.7.9 and the latest MariaDB 10.1.6. With this, I hope to witness a GA release of either flavor that does not break MySQL-Sandbox. We'll see!

MySQL Sandbox 1.21 - matrioska and launchpad

MySQL Sandbox has moved to a new home. It is now hosted at Launchpad, a friendly environment where developers can work together.

What's new with MySQL Sandbox? The matrioskas in the image are a clue. Version 1.21 introduces the concept of SANDBOX_HOME, which previously was only a path under which store the sandboxes. With time, when I was using more and more sandboxes, I realized that I wanted to take control of all the sandboxes at once, and issue global commands to all of them.
Starting with this version, the sandbox installer recognizes an environmental variable named $SANDBOX_HOME, and builds the sandboxes under that path.
In addition to grouping all the sandboxes in a place, the installer creates a few scripts that allow you to take control of all the active sandboxes.
Let's say that you have a single sandbox of MySQL 5.0.62, a replication system of 7 5.1.24 servers, and a multiple installation of 5 6.0.5 servers.
Prior to this version, if you wanted to stop each sandbox, you should have to enter each sandbox directory and run "./stop" or "./stop_all". With the sandbox outer container, you just have to run "./stop_all" from one place.
You can also execute the same command in each server in all your sandboxes, by means of the "./use_all" script.
If you want to learn more, on Thursday, June 12, 2008 at 15:00 CEST, I will host a MySQL University session on this very subject.