We've heard about exciting technologies on devconf this weekend, like software collections, which is an alternative way how to package multiple versions of packages, or docker, which offers a containerized environment for software delivery.
We've also heard about Copr, which is a new build system and allows to build software collection. What I didn't heard here was MariaDB, a community developed fork or MySQL, a default MySQL implementation in Fedora and which is developed by most of original developers of MySQL, who escaped from Sun or Oracle after things started to change. That was kind of my mistake and I'll definitely try to come up with something database-related the next year. But now, how these all things and technologies come together?
Imagine you take care about a public cloud environment and you're supposed to provide various versions of the awesome MariaDB database and for some non-disclosed reasons also original MySQL from Oracle. This service would be used on demand for some short time and so it should be as fast as possible.
Problem #1 -- packages of various versions of MariaDB and also MySQL are in conflict, so they are not able to be installed one one system. Usually. That could complicate your situation, since you would be able to offer only one database version on one particular machine at a time. Solution -- we can use the databases packaged as software collections, so files are properly put away to /opt/something.
Problem #2 -- my system, which is Fedora, does not include any scl packages I need. Solution -- we'll build them in Copr. It's just enough to edit the buildroot (we need to include the meta package and scl-utils-build to th buildroot, so we have all macros at a time the scl-ized package is parsed by RPM) add prepared srpms and wait a while to build the stuff.
Problem #3 -- full visualization is too big overhead if we want to provide just one little (well little is questionable) daemon. Solution -- we'll use docker.
So, this is a workflow, that could work in practice. First, we convert the MariaDB package into software collection package. Second, we build this package in Copr and save the repository from Copr in the containerized system in Docker.
Firing up a new database instance then means just creating a data directory for a new instance and running the daemon, while redirecting the port to hosting system. It will take a couple of seconds only and you'll have any version of database you want. Awesome, right?