Design Principles and Implementation of Inception – A MySQL SQL Review and Automation Tool

Zhou Yanwei, database director at Qunar.com and chair of the China MySQL Users Group (ACMUG), introduces his responsibilities in managing MySQL, Redis, and HBase platforms, and lists the major projects he led, including the Qunar MySQL development standards, backup platform, Redis high‑availability design, PXC architecture, client middleware, QMHA design, and the Inception tool, which has been open‑sourced.

In a recent GiTC2016 talk, Zhou and colleague Zhu Feng presented Inception, outlining five key design directions:

Align with programmers' habits

Shield users from common manual mistakes

Maintain full compatibility with MySQL syntax

Achieve the most perfect programming implementation

Support audit, execution, backup, and rollback

To meet programmers' expectations, Inception adopts the same MySQL connection protocol and SQL syntax, allowing users to interact with it using standard MySQL clients or custom applications without learning a new language.

By fully supporting MySQL's syntax through direct use of MySQL's source code, Inception ensures 100% compatibility and leverages existing MySQL parsing, binlog handling, and execution mechanisms.

The tool also provides a seamless audit‑execute workflow: it connects to the live database, obtains real‑time EXPLAIN information, evaluates the impact of each statement, and can execute approved SQL directly, reducing DBA manual steps.

During execution, Inception automatically backs up affected rows using MySQL's flashback capability based on binlog, enabling automatic rollback when needed.

Inception's SQL review component is open‑source; the project repository and documentation are available at https://github.com/mysql-inception/inception.git and http://mysql-inception.github.io/inception-document . Interested readers can join the discussion group (QQ 185803996) for further collaboration.