Tag Archives: gmax

The MySQL Sandbox

I learned about the MySQL Sandbox last year in Lisbon for the European Perl conference. I remember I talked about it with Giuseppe Maxia, the original author. I promised him to try it.

I wasn't really convinced about it until the first time I tried it.

That was when on My Opera we switched from master-slave to master-master replication. It was during a weekend last November. I was a bit scared of doing the switch. Then I remembered about MySQL Sandbox, and I tried it on an old laptop.

I was absolutely amazed to discover that I could simulate pretty much any setup, from simple to complex, master-slave, master-master, circular multi-master, etc…
It was also very quick to setup, and it's also very fast to install new sandboxed servers.
You can setup a 5 servers replication setup in less than 30 seconds.

MySQL Sandbox is a Perl tool that you can easily install from CPAN with:

$ sudo cpan MySQL-Sandbox

You get the make_sandbox command that allows you to create new sandboxes. Right now I'm trying it again for a maintainance operation we have to do on My Opera soon. I'm using the master-master setup like this:

make_replication_sandbox --master_master --server-version=/home/cosimo/mysql/mysql-5.0.51a-....tar.gz

so I can simulate the entire operation and try to minimize the risk of messing up the production boxes while also getting a bit more confident about these procedures.

MySQL Sandbox, try it. You won't go back :-)