Texas Instruments Manages Large Regression Testing Application with MySQL

Texas Instruments, Inc. (TI) is a global semiconductor company and a designer and supplier of digital signal processors and analog integrated circuits, with nearly $2 billion in annual sales. To ensure that TI technology is of the highest quality, the company puts its semiconductor products through rigorous regression testing. TI has leveraged the MySQL database's speed and reliability to run a five-gigabyte regression testing application with over 13 million rows to test a TI DSP product. MySQL is also used in a bug-tracking system that is used by many different TI groups across the globe.

"Our database of choice has always been MySQL, and there's never been a reason to go anywhere else", said Jayesh Tolia, EDA Software Designer, who manages the MySQL-based regression testing and bug tracking applications at TI.

The regression testing, which was performed on a TI DSP product that is now in production and has won awards, put the chip through a series of random tests that mimic real world use. The TI team tracked each event instance in MySQL, with 38,000 test cases across one-half to one million events. The regression tests, which resulted in a total number of hits ranging from a few thousand to several million, with the largest being over 13 million, were run daily.

"MySQL was a huge database, and it was really stable", noted Tolia. "And we have all the expertise we need to write all the MySQL scripts here, which is really nice".

Tolia also uses the MySQL database as the foundation for a bug tracking application, which started out small, but has grown into a large application with about 70 projects and 1000 users from many different TI groups across the globe.

"Our group has always used MySQL, and other areas of TI are catching on to it as well now", said Tolia.

TI's MySQL applications run on Sun Sparc machines with the Sun Solaris operating system.