After we released pquery to the community, and as we started logging bug reports with pquery testcases, it quickly became clear that pquery binaries with statically compiled-in client libraries would be of great convenience, both for ourselves and for the community.
(If you haven’t heard about pquery yet, read the pquery introduction blog post, come and join the pquery introduction lightning talk at Percona Live (15 April just around 6PM in Hall A), or keep an eye out for some of the upcoming episodes in the MySQL QA Series.)
While we were in the process of creating these binaries (which turned out to be not as straighforward as we thought it would be), we also disovered a rather significant memory de-allocation bug in pquery, which would at times have caused pquery to crash (segfault). I want to especially thank Sergei for helping get the client libraries compiled into pquery, as well as fixing the segfault memory de-allocation bug and some other problems we found, and Ramesh who helped with binary testing and debugging.
I also want to thank Sveta (previously at Oracle, now at Percona), Umesh (Oracle), and Satya Bodapati (Oracle) for not giving up too easily when we logged some bug reports with dynamically linked (i.e. client libs not included) and at times failing pquery binaries!
Now, the pquery binaries with statically included client binaries are finally ready! We have pquery-ps (with static Percona Server 5.6 client libs), pquery-ms (with static MySQL 5.6 client libs), and pquery-md (with static MariaDB 5.5 client libs). The pquery binaries can also be used to test any other community solution or product. For example, we use it to test our beloved Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) using specially developed pquery+Docker+PXC scripts.
Things have also continued to evolve quickly in the pquery framework, as well as in the accompanying reducer.sh ($ bzr branch lp:randgen – available as randgen/util/reducer/reducer.sh), so check out the many updates now! To get it, $ bzr branch lp:percona-qa and start by having a look at pquery-run.sh
You may also like to checkout our latest pquery-reach.sh and pquery-reach++.sh – which are a wrapper around most of the major pquery framework tools. Not as straightforward to use and setup as pquery-run.sh (as it requires setup within the sub-scripts it uses…), but reviewing pquery-reach.sh will give you a good idea on how to setup pquery-run.sh and get into things.
Stay tuned for the upcoming MySQL QA episodes (link above), and you’ll soon be hunting bugs like Mr. Nuclear! (To meet (the nice) Mr. Nuclear, come and see our lightning talk at Percona Live!)
Enjoy!
