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Easily remove unused MySQL databases

by Sander Marechal

I use PHPUnit and the DbUnit extension for my unit tests. Because I use InnoDB tables with foreign keys I cannot use an SQLite database or temporary tables to run my unittests on. So, I have set up a separate MySQL server to run all my unittests on. My PHPUnit bootstrap script simply generates a random database name and imports the schema so that DbUnit can use it.

The only downside is that after a while, you get a bunch of unused databases on the server. So, I have written a simple bash cronjob that deletes all databases from the server that have not been used for 30 days. This script uses the debian-sys-maint MySQL user that is automatically set up on all Debian systems for maintenance tasks.