Percona Server 5.5.11-20.2 is now available for download, including an experimental build for MacOS. Released on April 28, 2011, it is the current stable release in the the 5.5 series.

New Features

1. HandlerSocket, a NoSQL plugin for MySQL, has been updated to the latest stable version as April 11th, 2011.
2. InnoDB fast index creation now works with mysqldump, ALTER TABLE and OPTIMIZE TABLE. (Alexey Kopytov)

Variable Changes

1. Variable innodb_extra_rsegments was removed because the equivalent, ‘innodb_rollback_segments’, has been implemented in MySQL 5.5. (Yasufumi Kinoshita)

Bug Fixes

1. …

Good news for all Percona Software users out there. There are more ways how you can get access to Percona Software. If you’re using Scalr (See also Scalr Project on Google Code) you might be interested in Percona Server roles support Scalr team has announced recently. If you’re Mac user and looking for complete development environment for PHP and MySQL you can check out MNPP which also includes lightweight Ngnix web server instead of Apache.

Now about any Open Source projects including or based on Percona Server or Xtrabackup ? Let us know !

Time for our weekly review of the news! The big news this week is that Percona XtraBackup is ready to try out on Windows. Otherwise, there’s just more steady progress.

One quick note, sort of a “to whom it may concern,” is that the proper trademarked names of our products include “Percona Server”, “Percona XtraDB”, and “Percona XtraBackup”. “XtraDB” and “XtraBackup” are also Percona trademarks, but the proper names of the products include “Percona” at the beginning. The word “xtrabackup” alone and lowercased is only proper when referring to the xtrabackup compiled C binary, e.g. in how-to documentation in a context that includes the whole product name. We are happy to grant written permission for appropriate use of the trademarks. We’re working on publishing an official trademark policy on our website.

• We continue progress towards our Percona Server 5.5 release.
• Percona XtraBackup …

There have been recent discussions about DROP TABLE performance in InnoDB. (You can refer to Peter’s post http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2011/02/03/performance-problem-with-innodb-and-drop-table/ and these bug reports: http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=51325 and http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=56332.) It may not sound that serious, but if your workload often uses DROP TABLE and you have a big buffer pool, it may be a significant issue. This can get especially painful, as during this operation InnoDB holds the LOCK_open mutex, which prevents other queries from executing. So, this is a problem for a server with a large amount of memory, like the one we have in our lab: a …

Last week wasn’t so active in terms of new development, because many of us were at the MySQL conference, of course. However, we did push out the XtraBackup 1.6 release, and began work on backporting some features from MySQL 5.6 to 5.1 for a certain large customer. Several of the features we’ve added in 5.0 and 5.1 are reimplemented in MySQL 5.6, which is great. It means that we can backport Oracle’s code and we don’t have to maintain these features ourselves anymore.

The MySQL conference, and to some extent the Collaborate conference, was a great meeting for a lot of developers. Many meetings had attendees from Oracle, Percona, MariaDB, and Drizzle developers. Some events had participation from senior management in the various companies. There were also a lot of productive meetings with large customers who use MySQL. I take these all together as a sign that the pace of MySQL development could continue to accelerate in the future. …

Percona Server version 5.1.56-12.7 is now available for download. It is based on MySQL 5.1.56 and is the current stable release in the 5.1 series.

New Features

• Expanded the applicability of InnoDB fast index creation to mysqldump, ALTER TABLE and, OPTIMIZE TABLE. (Alexey Kopytov)

Variables Changed

• Variable innodb_stats_method has been implemented in the upstream InnoDB, with the same name and functionality that had previously existed only in XtraDB. (Yasufumi Kinoshita)

Other Changes

• Implemented support for variable innodb_stats_method being implemented in the upstream InnoDB, including adding a column to table INNODB_SYS_STATS. Bug fixed: #733317. (Yasufumi Kinoshita) …

Percona XtraBackup 1.6 is now available for download and is the current stable release version of XtraBackup.

Options Added

• Added option --extra-lsndir to innobackupex. When specified for the backup phase, the option is passed to xtrabackup, and lsn information is stored with the file in the specified directory. This is needed so that lsn information is preserved during stream backup. (Vadim Tkachenko)
• Added option --incremental-lsn to innobackupex. If specified, this option is passed directly to the xtrabackup script and --incremental-basedir is ignored. (Vadim Tkachenko)
• Added option --incremental-dir to innobackupex. This option is passed directly to the xtrabackup binary. (Vadim Tkachenko)
• Added option --safe-slave-backupto innobackupex. (Daniel Nichter)
• Added option --safe-slave-backup-timeout to innobackupex. (Daniel Nichter)

Other Changes

…

Last week was rather less newsworthy in Percona Server land, as we spent a lot of time preparing for the MySQL Conference and Collaborate, and Vadim was on vacation. One interesting tidbit: I wrote some scripts analyze our log files and found that we were massively under-counting the number of downloads for Percona Server, due to failing to count all the variations of package names. In fact, we have over 250k downloads for Percona Server. (I’ve requested the dev team to be very careful with consistent naming in the future.) In Percona Server news, we continued polishing up the 5.5 release, which should be ready to download very soon. In XtraBackup news, we should release XtraBackup 1.6 with a large list of new features and improvements very soon, and we worked more on Drizzle support for XtraBackup, exchanging lots of merge proposals with the Drizzle development team.

I don’t use many tools in my consulting practice but for the ones I do, I try to know them as best as I can. I’ve been using mk-query-digest for almost as long as it exists but it continues to surprise me in ways I couldn’t imagine it would. This time I’d like to share a quick tip on how mk-query-digest allows you to slice your data in a completely different way than it otherwise would by default.

Disclaimer: this only works when persistent connections or connection pools aren’t used and is only accurate when single mysql connection is used during execution of a request.

If you are seeking to reduce the load on the database server and [as a result] increase response time for some random user requests, you are usually interested in queries that are consuming most MySQL time and that’s how mk-query-digest groups and …

Here’s the weekly review of Percona Server and XtraBackup news. Before I begin, let me briefly address a common question. We are sometimes asked about our plans in light of developments in the market such as MySQL 5.5, MariaDB, Drizzle, etc. The short answer is that we’re very happy with Oracle’s GPL’ed MySQL releases as a baseline for Percona Server, we think that it is extremely important to continue developing Percona Server, we don’t see the need for any major changes to how we’re doing that right now, and we plan to stay the course. This question has helped us to see the need for a prominent public roadmap for Percona Server’s future, and we will work on creating that, to provide a longer and more detailed answer to this and other questions. Now, on to the news:

In Percona Server news,

• We released Percona Server 5.5.10-20.1 as a Release Candidate. ( …