May 2017 Archives

2017 Perl Toolchain Summit

This year I had one goal for CPAN Testers: Replace the current Metabase API with a new API that did not write to Amazon SimpleDB. The current high-availability database that raw incoming test reports are written is Amazon SimpleDB behind an API called Metabase. Metabase is a highly-flexible data storage API designed to work with massive, unstructured data sets and still allow for sane organization and storage of data. Unfortunately, Amazon SimpleDB is as it says on the tin: Simple. Worse, it's expensive: Like most Amazon services, it charges for usage, so there's a huge incentive for CPAN Testers to use it as little as possible (which made some of the code quite obtuse).

So, I made a plan to excise the Metabase. Since we already cached every raw test report locally in the CPAN Testers MySQL database, I planned to write a new Metabase API that wrote directly to the cache, and then adjust the backend processing to read from the cache. I spent the better part of a month working through all the Metabase APIs, how the data was stored in the database, and how to translate between a simple JSON format and the serialized Metabase objects. However, some proper schema design prevented me from finishing this project: A single NOT NULL column could not be changed to allow nulls very easily, it being a 600GB table. The one time where a well-designed schema was a bad thing!

But then Garu, author of cpanm-reporter and CPAN::Testers::Common::Client came up with an idea to make a new test report format. These new reports would have to be stored in a new place, and I discovered that MySQL had recently started building some rich JSON tooling. Making a new JSON test report format and storing it in our new high-availability MySQL cluster seemed like a perfect solution for storing our raw test reports.

After a few weeks of discussion, I finally realized that it would be an easier task to make a backwards-compatible Metabase API write to the new test report MySQL table, even though it increased the amount of work that needed to be done:

  • Complete the new test report format schema (Garu)
  • Write the new backwards-compatibility Metabase API (Me)
  • Write a new test report processor that writes to the old Metabase cache tables (Joel Berger)
  • Write a migration script from the old Metabase cache tables to the new test report JSON object (?)

With that plan, I headed for Lyon.

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