[francislavoie]

Is anyone aware of something like this for MariaDB?

Something we've been trying to solve for a long time is having instant DB resets between acceptance tests (in CI or locally) back to our known fixture state, but right now it takes decently long (like half a second to a couple seconds, I haven't benchmarked it in a while) and that's by far the slowest thing in our tests.

I just want fast snapshotted resets/rewinds to a known DB state, but I need to be using MariaDB since it's what we use in production, we can't switch DB tech at this stage of the project, even though Postgres' grass looks greener.

[proaralyst]

You could use LVM or btrfs snapshots (at the filesystem level) if you're ok restarting your database between runs

[francislavoie]

Restarting the DB is unfortunately way too slow. We run the DB in a docker container with a tmpfs (in-memory) volume which helps a lot with speed, but the problem is still the raw compute needed to wipe the tables and re-fill them with the fixtures every time.

[renewiltord]

I have not done this so it’s theorycrafting but can’t you do the following?

1. Have a local data dir with initial state

2. Create an overlayfs with a temporary directory

3. Launch your job in your docker container with the overlayfs bind mount as your data directory

4. That’s it. Writes go to the overlay and the base directory is untouched

[francislavoie]

But how does the reset happen fast, the problem isn't with preventing permanent writes or w/e, it's with actually resetting for the next test. Also using overlayfs will immediately be slower at runtime than tmpfs which we're already doing.

[exceptione]

Resetting is free if you discard the overlayfs writes, no? I am not sure if one can discard at runtime, or if the next test should be run in a new container. But that should still be fast.

If your db is small enough to fit in tmpfs, than sure, that is hard to beat. But then xfs and zfs are overkill too.

EDIT: I see you mentioning that starting the db is slow due to wiping and filling at runtime. But the idea of a snapshot is that you don't have to do that, unless I misunderstand you.

[peterldowns]

Yeah unfortunately I think that it's not really possible to hit the speed of a TEMPLATE copy with MariaDB. @EvanElias (maintainer of https://github.com/skeema/skeema about this) was looking into it at one point, might consider reaching out to him — he's the foremost mysql expert that I know.

[evanelias]

Thanks for the kind words Peter!

There's actually a potential solution here, but I haven't personally tested it: transportable tablespaces in either MySQL [1] or MariaDB [2].

The basic idea is it allows you to take pre-existing table data files from the filesystem and use them directly for a table's data. So with a bit of custom automation, you could have a setup where you have pre-exported fixture table data files, which you then make a copy of at the filesystem level, and then import as tablespaces before running each test. So a key step is making that fs copy fast, either by having it be in-memory (tmpfs) or by using a copy-on-write filesystem.

If you have a lot of tables then this might not be much faster than the 0.5-2s performance cited above though. iirc there have been some edge cases and bugs relating to the transportable tablespace feature over the years as well, but I'm not really up to speed on the status of that in recent MySQL or MariaDB.

[1] https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/innodb-table-import....

[2] https://mariadb.com/docs/server/server-usage/storage-engines...

[renewiltord]

Ah I was thinking you just start multiple overlays and run tests independent of each other.

[ikatson]

How about do the changes then bake them into the DB docker image. I.e. "docker commit".

Then spin up the dB using that image instead of an empty one for every test run.

This implies starting the DB through docker is faster than what you're doing now of course.

[francislavoie]

Yeah there's absolutely no way restarting the container will be faster.

[briffle]

LVM snapshots work well. Used it for years with other database tools.. But make sure you allocate enough write space for the COW.. when the write space fills up, LVM just 'drops' the snapshot.

[pak9rabid]

I was able to accomplish this by doing each test within its own transaction session that gets rolled-back after each test. This way I'm allowed to modify the database to suit my needs for each test, then it gets magically reset back to its known state for the next test. Transaction rollbacks are very quick.

[hu3]

As a consultant, I saw many teams doing that and it works well.

The only detail is that autoincrements (SEQUENCEs for PotgreSQL folks) gets bumped even if the transaction rollsback.

So tables tend to get large ids quickly. But it's just dev database so no problem.

[francislavoie]

Unfortunately a lot of our tests use transactions themselves because we lock the user row when we do anything to ensure consistency, and I'm pretty sure nested transactions are still not a thing.

[hu3]

You can emulate nested transactions using save points. A client uses that in production. And others in unit tests.

[pak9rabid]

Bingo...this is how I get around that.

[fanf2]

This doesn’t work for testing migrations because MySQL/MariaDB doesn’t support DDL inside transactions, unlike PostgreSQL.

[pak9rabid]

Migrations are kind of a different beast. In that case I just stand up a test environment in Docker that does what it needs, then just trash it once things have been tested/verified.