Transition from MockAccumulo to a full blown local instance

[Jesse Yates <je...@gmail.com>]

Maintaining a real instance and a mock instance ends up creating a lot of
extra work for dev's by ensuring that there impls are kept synchronized.

Instead, we should move to an actual hosted instance of Accumulo running on
the local file system. This would mean less work in the long run to maintain
a separate instance and better testing for users and new features.

It will also mean we can create an instance of Accumulo running in local
mode that users can spin up when trying out the system. Therefore once we
have a local instance, we would want to update the documentation on run
scripts to enable using the local instance.

What does everyone think?

-Jesse Yates

Re: Transition from MockAccumulo to a full blown local instance

[Jesse Yates <je...@gmail.com>]

Keith,

I can definitely see the advantages of not wanting to spin up a mini cluster
for testing - its currently killing HBase's test suite run time.

As far as cutting down the mocks, I'm all for it. One of the big advantages
of having a mini cluster run in the same jvm is that it behaves _exactly_
like a real cluster, so if your tests pass locally, then there is a very
good chance that it will run in production. Using the mock mechanism, its
more of a sanity check - yeah, its doing what I think, but I'm still praying
that it won't break my cluster.

I opened ACCUMULO-14 to discuss it further.

-Jesse Yates

On Wed, Oct 5, 2011 at 12:33 PM, Keith Turner <kt...@apache.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 5, 2011 at 1:17 AM, Jesse Yates <je...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Maintaining a real instance and a mock instance ends up creating a lot of
> > extra work for dev's by ensuring that there impls are kept synchronized.
> >
> > Instead, we should move to an actual hosted instance of Accumulo running
> on
> > the local file system. This would mean less work in the long run to
> maintain
> > a separate instance and better testing for users and new features.
> >
> > It will also mean we can create an instance of Accumulo running in local
> > mode that users can spin up when trying out the system. Therefore once we
> > have a local instance, we would want to update the documentation on run
> > scripts to enable using the local instance.
> >
> > What does everyone think?
> >
> > -Jesse Yates
> >
>
> We have discussed some aspects of this.  There are two nice things
> about the way mock works now.  First, its very fast to create a mock
> instance which means that unit test run very quickly.  Second, its all
> in process which is useful for debugging.
>
> You mentioned one of the drawbacks, more work to maintain it.  Another
> drawback is that it may behave differently in some circumstances,
> since its another implementation.
>
> We have discussed possibly making mock leverage more of the actual
> accumulo code, but possibly keep it in process for speed and
> debugging.  We know it needs improvement, and are open to suggestions.
>  We need to work out a plan/design for how we want to move forward.
>
> Keith
>

Re: Transition from MockAccumulo to a full blown local instance

[Keith Turner <kt...@apache.org>]

On Wed, Oct 5, 2011 at 1:17 AM, Jesse Yates <je...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Maintaining a real instance and a mock instance ends up creating a lot of
> extra work for dev's by ensuring that there impls are kept synchronized.
>
> Instead, we should move to an actual hosted instance of Accumulo running on
> the local file system. This would mean less work in the long run to maintain
> a separate instance and better testing for users and new features.
>
> It will also mean we can create an instance of Accumulo running in local
> mode that users can spin up when trying out the system. Therefore once we
> have a local instance, we would want to update the documentation on run
> scripts to enable using the local instance.
>
> What does everyone think?
>
> -Jesse Yates
>

We have discussed some aspects of this.  There are two nice things
about the way mock works now.  First, its very fast to create a mock
instance which means that unit test run very quickly.  Second, its all
in process which is useful for debugging.

You mentioned one of the drawbacks, more work to maintain it.  Another
drawback is that it may behave differently in some circumstances,
since its another implementation.

We have discussed possibly making mock leverage more of the actual
accumulo code, but possibly keep it in process for speed and
debugging.  We know it needs improvement, and are open to suggestions.
 We need to work out a plan/design for how we want to move forward.

Keith