Using dbdeployer in CI tests

I was very pleased when Giuseppe Maxia (aka datacharmer) unveiled dbdeployer in his talk at pre-FOSDEM MySQL day. The announcement came just at the right time. I wish to briefly describe how we use dbdeployer (work in progress).

The case for gh-ost

A user opened an issue on gh-ost, and the user was using MySQL 5.5. gh-ost is being tested on 5.7 where the problem does not reproduce. A discussion with Gillian Gunson raised the concern of not testing on all versions. Can we run gh-ost tests for all MySQL/Percona/MariaDB versions? Should we? How easy would it be?

gh-ost tests

gh-ost has three different test types:

  • Unit tests: these are plain golang logic tests which are very easy and quick to run.
  • Integration tests: the topic of this post, see following. Today these do not run as part of an automated CI testing.
  • System tests: putting our production tables to the test, continuously migrating our production data on dedicated replicas, verifying checksums are identical and data is intact, read more.

Unit tests are already running as part of automated CI (every PR is subjected to those tests). Systems tests are clearly tied to our production servers. What’s the deal with the integration tests? Continue reading » “Using dbdeployer in CI tests”