While preparing for the yesterday's MySQL/MariaDB 5.5 talk at the Mail.Ru technical forum, I downloaded the source code of three 5.5 forks - Oracle, Percona and MariaDB. And was happy that my g'old way of sandboxing an instance without installing it still works.

I don't know whether MySQL sandbox is using this approach under the hood, here it goes:

[client]
port        = 3307
host        = 127.0.0.1
socket      = /opt/local/var/mysql/mysql.sock

[mysqld]
gdb # this one is necessary just to sandbox
max_allowed_packet=16M
port=3307
socket=/opt/local/var/mysql/mysql.sock
language=/home/kostja/work/mariadb/5.5/sql/share/english
character-sets-dir=/home/kostja/work/mariadb/5.5/share/charsets
basedir=/home/kostja/work/mariadb/5.5
datadir=/opt/local/var/mysql
server_id=1

3. Now we need to populate the data directory. Here's how:

shell> mysqld --bootstrap

create database mysql

You could do the same in step 4, it's just fun that when nothing else works you can send queries to mysqld using the standard input.

4. Now let's restart mysqld with --skip-grant-tables, create all the necessary system tables and fill them with data:

shell> mysqld --skip-grant-tables

shell> mysql

use mysql  -- the below scripts don't choose the default database
source /home/kostja/work/mariadb/5.5/scripts/mysql_system_tables.sql
source /home/kostja/work/mariadb/5.5/scripts/mysql_system_tables_data.sql

sudo echo "deb http://tarantool.org/dist/debian/ unstable main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install tarantool

• a new WAL I/O algorithm, increasing write-bound performance by at least 70%. The patch both lowers request processing latency, which gives us the lower performance boundary in single-connection benchmarks, and increases write throughput, giving 200%+ increase in multi-threaded write workloads,
• use hardware CRC32 to calculate checksums when writing to the write ahead log,
• it's now possible to push, pop, insert and delete fields in the middle of a tuple with UPDATE. Since one can pack multiple UPDATE commands into a single request, and these commands are then executed atomically, this is the most primitive form of multi-statement transaction support (other transaction features are in the pipeline),
• more compact and efficient TREE indexes,
• reverse iterators: you can now browse an index in reverse order,
• positioned iteration over a multi-part index: it's possible to position an iterator in Lua using only a prefix of a multipart key, and retrieve all tuples which match the prefix,
• full support of 64-bit integers in Lua (in addition to 32-bit integers, which we supported since 1.3),
• a couple of dozen of bugfixes.

kostja@atlas:~$ ./a.out 
   size  	mmap time	munmap time	t1/t2   	t2/size
   1048576	0.000006	0.000281	46.833333	0.026798
   2097152	0.000008	0.000388	48.500000	0.018501
   4194304	0.000006	0.001230	205.000000	0.029325
   8388608	0.000008	0.000680	85.000000	0.008106
  16777216	0.000002	0.001550	775.000000	0.009239
  33554432	0.000002	0.002711	1355.500000	0.008079
  67108864	0.000006	0.005897	982.833333	0.008787
 134217728	0.000007	0.010866	1552.285714	0.008096
 268435456	0.000004	0.020137	5034.250000	0.007502
 536870912	0.000005	0.040046	8009.200000	0.007459
1073741824	0.000011	0.067541	6140.090909	0.006290