What you need for this book

As you proceed with this book, you will see a lot of features, solutions, and practical exercises that require technical tests. It's not often easy to test everything in the correct environment.

Many feel that preparing an environment is a waste of time, and they are right! To avoid it and concentrate on the content of the book, we'll use virtual machines. To make it fast and simple, we're going to use VirtualBox and Vagrant. If you are not acquainted with these tools, don't worry, we will show you how to use them here.

These tools will help you test everything very quickly (a few seconds/minutes). The advantages of both tools are:

• They are free
• They can run on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows
• Fast instance provisioning

To install them, go to the official websites and download and install them on your current infrastructure:

• VirtualBox: https://www.virtualbox.org/
• Vagrant: http://www.vagrantup.com/

In this book, every exercise will run on Debian GNU/Linux Wheezy amd64 version on a VirtualBox. That's why, after installing both the latest versions of those tools, I suggest you work in a separate folder/box per exercise:

1. Create a folder named MariaDB that will contain all the exercises of this book.
2. Inside that folder, create a subfolder named Chapter X, where X is the chapter number.
3. Inside the Chapter X subfolder, create another subfolder named Exercise X, where X is the name of the section.
4. Place the appropriate content of the Vagrantfile in the Exercise X folder.
5. Inside that folder, power up machines (you absolutely need to be in to perform actions on the virtual machines):

   vagrant up
   

6. And access them in the following manner:

   vagrant ssh (for a single machine)
   vagrant ssh machine-name (for multiple machines)
   

You're now ready for the exercises. When the exercises finish and you want to get your disk space back, you can stop and remove them with the following command:

vagrant halt
vagrant destroy

Then, you can remove the current folder.