The Ultimate Guide to High Availability with MariaDB

How to switch between different installed MariaDB versions

You are viewing an old version of this article. View the current version here.

Contents

  1. Stopping a pre-installed MySQL/MariaDB from interfering with your tests
  2. How to create a binary distribution (tar file)
  3. Creating a directory structure for the different installations
  4. Setting up the data directory
    1. Setting up a common data directory
    2. Setting up different data directories
  5. Running a MariaDB server
  6. Setting up a .my.cnf file for running multiple MariaDB main versions

This article is about how to manage many different installed MariaDB version and running them one at a time. This is useful when doing benchmarking, testing or developing different MariaDB versions.

This is most easily done by using tar files from the downloads area.

Stopping a pre-installed MySQL/MariaDB from interfering with your tests

If MySQL/MariaDB is already installed and running, you have two options:

  • Use the test MariaDB servers with a different port & socket.
    • In this case you are probably best of by creating a specific section for MariaDB in your ~/.my.cnf file.
  • Take down mysqld with /etc/rc.d/mysql stop or mysqladmin shutdown. Note that you don't have to deinstall MySQL!

How to create a binary distribution (tar file)

Here follows first a short description of how to generate a tar file from a source distribution. If you have downloaded a tar file, you can skip this section.

The steps to create a tar file is:

Then you will be left with a tar file with something like: mariadb-5.3.2-MariaDB-beta-linux-x86_64.tar.gz

Creating a directory structure for the different installations

Install the binary tar files under /usr/local/ with the following directory names:

  • mariadb-5.1
  • mariadb-5.2
  • mariadb-5.3

The above assumes you are just testing major version. If you want to have specific versions, use directory names like mariadb-5.3.2

Then add a link from the directory you want to use just now to mariadb. This allows you to easily move between different installations by just changing the link.

Example:

cd /usr/local
tar xfz /tmp/mariadb-5.3.2-MariaDB-beta-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
mv mariadb-5.3.2-MariaDB-beta-linux-x86_64 mariadb-5.3
ln -s mariadb-5.3 mariadb

Setting up the data directory

You have the options of either using a shared database directory or creating a unique database directory per server. For testing, a common directory is probably easiest. Note that you can only have one mysqld server running against one data directory.

Setting up a common data directory

The steps are:

  • Create the mysql system user if you don't have it already! (On Linux you do it with the useradd command).
  • Creating the directory (belove we call it mariadb-data) or adding a symlink to a directory on some other place.
  • Create the mysql permission tables with mysql_install_db 
cd /usr/local/
mkdir mariadb-data
cd mariadb
./bin/mysql_install_db --no-defaults --datadir=/usr/local/mariadb-data
chown -R mysql mariadb-data mariadb-data/*

The reason to use --no-defaults is to ensure that we don't get wrong options from some old my.cnf.

Setting up different data directories

To create a different data directory for each installation:

cd mariadb
./bin/mysql_install_db --no-defaults
chown -R mysql mariadb-data mariadb-data/*

This will create a directory data inside the current directory.

If you want to use another disk you should do:

cd mariadb
ln -s path-to-empty-directory-for-data data
./bin/mysql_install_db --no-defaults --datadir=./data
chown -R mysql mariadb-data mariadb-data/*

Running a MariaDB server

The normal steps are:

rm mariadb
ln -s mariadb-5.# mariadb
cd mariadb
./bin/mysqld_safe --no-defaults --datadir=/usr/local/mariadb-data &

Setting up a .my.cnf file for running multiple MariaDB main versions

If you are going to start/stop MariaDB a lot of times, you should create a ~/.my.cnf file for the common options you are using.

The following example show how you to use a non-standard TCP-port and socket (to not interfere with a main MySQL/MariaDB server) and how to setup different options for each main server:

[client]
socket=/tmp/mysql.sock
port=3306
[mysqld]
socket=/tmp/mysql.sock
port=3306
datadir=/usr/local/mariadb-data

[mariadb-5.2]
# Options for MariaDB 5.2
[mariadb-5.3]
# Options for MariaDB 5.3

If you create an ~/.my.cnf file, you should start mysqld with --defaults-file=~/.my.cnf instead of --no-defaults in the examples above.

Comments

Comments loading...
Content reproduced on this site is the property of its respective owners, and this content is not reviewed in advance by MariaDB. The views, information and opinions expressed by this content do not necessarily represent those of MariaDB or any other party.