HOWTO Use Docker For Creating MySQL Test Instances (Doc ID 2553093.1)

Last updated on FEBRUARY 26, 2020

Applies to:

Goal

Docker is a container runtime environment that allows programs to operate in a jailed environment without any required external dependencies.  Containers are similar in some concepts to virtual machines, however they do not user a hypervisor and run in a single kernel instance, often sharing the instance with other containers.  One of the prime features of containerization is the lack of external dependencies; the container has all of the runtime libraries and components needed to run the application.

Oracle has been providing Docker container images since MySQL 5.5.40 and thus makes Docker an excellent choice for performing testing across multiple MySQL versions and releases.  Often times it is desirable to perform regression testing of a bug to determine what release(s) the bug affects or to quantify how the behavior changed between releases.

Docker enables fairly lightweight launching of MySQL instances with an automatic cleanup feature once testing is complete.

In this document I will demonstrate some of the ways you can use Docker to launch MySQL and use it for testing.

Solution

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