Testing the Cluster with ANSTE

Testing is important when we develop software, it can easily range from 50 to 75 percent of the total development cost. When it comes to big and complex projects like MySQL, testing is essential. MySQL is downloaded and used in production by millions of companies every day, and nobody wants the database to fail.

MySQL already has a testing framework, which works quite well for the most common testing scenarios. The current framework can even test complex environments like replication or MySQL cluster, by starting different instances of MySQL in the same computer. This may be enough for most of the scenarios, but can lead to some untested cases.

If we can’t emulate a real network, we can’t test what should be happening when different network problems arise. One of this cases is what we call “split brain”, which is what happens in a cluster when half of the nodes can’t see the other half. This might be the most obvious case where a more advanced testing framework would help, but there must be many more.

To “fix” this problem, we are going to showcase ANSTE, an open source tool we developed to help us testing the eBox platform, a product offering everything for the efficient administration of a corporate network in a single technology. eBox is a project which shows some similarities to MySQL: big codebase and feature set, needs to be stable as businesses must be able to relay on it, depends on advanced network configurations in some cases. We created ANSTE to solve the problems testing eBox, and it could easily solve the same issues in MySQL.

During the session, we’ll show some of the scenarios which ANSTE can test. A very simple one –to demonstrate how easy is to get started–, a complex one –to show what it’s able to do–, and another related to MySQL Cluster –so it’s clear that it can be useful for MySQL. Finally, we’ll have a simple step-by-step tutorial on how to create your first test scenario.

We hope to get some MySQL developers interested, and show how this can help make MySQL –and specially the cluster– more stable and well tested. Also, other developers can find different ways to integrate ANSTE in their application testing.