The test system that is included in Unix source and binary distributions makes it possible for users and developers to perform regression tests on the MySQL code. These tests can be run on Unix.

The current set of test cases doesn't test everything in MySQL, but it should catch most obvious bugs in the SQL processing code, operating system or library issues, and is quite thorough in testing replication. Our goal is to have the tests cover 100% of the code. We welcome contributions to our test suite. You may especially want to contribute tests that examine the functionality critical to your system because this ensures that all future MySQL releases work well with your applications.

The test system consists of a test language interpreter (mysqltest), a shell script to run all tests (mysql-test-run), the actual test cases written in a special test language, and their expected results. To run the test suite on your system after a build, type make test from the source root directory, or change location to the mysql-test directory and type ./mysql-test-run. If you have installed a binary distribution, change location to the mysql-test directory under the installation root directory (for example, /usr/local/mysql/mysql-test), and run ./mysql-test-run. All tests should succeed. If any do not, you should try to find out why and report the problem if it indicates a bug in MySQL. See Section 1.8, “How to Report Bugs or Problems”.

If one test fails, you should run mysql-test-run with the --force option to check whether any other tests fail.

From MySQL 4.1 on, if you have a copy of mysqld running on the machine where you want to run the test suite, you do not have to stop it, as long as it is not using ports 9306 or 9307. If either of those ports is taken, you should edit mysql-test-run and change the values of the master or slave port to one that is available.

Before MySQL 4.1, mysql-test-run does not try to run its own server by default but tries to use your currently running server. To override this and cause mysql-test-run to start its own server, run it with the --local option.

In the mysql-test directory, you can run an individual test case with ./mysql-test-run test_name.

You can use the mysqltest language to write your own test cases. This is documented in the MySQL Test Framework manual, available at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/.

If you have a question about the test suite, or have a test case to contribute, send an email message to the MySQL internals mailing list. See Section 1.7.1, “MySQL Mailing Lists”. This list does not accept attachments, so you should FTP all the relevant files to: ftp://ftp.mysql.com/pub/mysql/upload/