In this post I will describe a non-trivial way to authenticate users in Percona Sever for MySQL. Percona Server comes with PAM authentication plugin, which allows you to do a lot of cool things, such as: OS authentication, LDAP authentication, even RSA Secure Server authentication (which is useful if you are required a PCI-compliance), and use Google Authenticator, which is the topic of this post.

You can use a smartphone for two-factor authentication with Percona Server for MySQL

With two-factor authentication a user is required to enter not only password, but to have an additional security token, which in the case with Google Authenticator can be your cell-phone (clients are available for Android, iPhone, Windows Mobile or BlackBerry with …

With our newest release of Percona XtraDB Cluster, I would like to highlight a very nice ability to recovery a node and bring it back to the cluster with an incremental transfer after a crash.
This feature was available even in previous release, but now I want to give some details.

So, MySQL crashes from time to time and this a fact of life. HA solution is exactly needed to deal with an one node failure and allowing whole cluster continuing to work.

The idea is, if a node crashed, after it recovered – we just transfer all changes that happened in the cluster, while the node was down. It sounds easy in words, but proven hard when it comes to implementation. It all comes to the question: if mysqld crashes, how do we know what is the last transaction was executed. For a single InnoDB instance it is …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraDB Cluster on January 30th, 2013. Binaries are available from downloads area or from our software repositories.

Bugs fixed:

• In some cases when node is recovered variable threads_running would become huge. Bug fixed #1040108 (Teemu Ollakka).
• Variable wsrep_defaults_file would be set up to the value in the last configuration file read. Bug fixed by keeping the value found in the top configuration file. Bug fixed …

We continue to improve Percona XtraBackup, and today I would like to give a preview for one feature which comes in next Percona XtraBackup 2.1 release.

This feature is “Compact backups”, and let me explain what it does.
As you may know InnoDB PK (Primary Key) contains all data, and all secondary indexes are only subset of columns of Primary Key. So in theory we can store only PK, and re-build secondary indexes as we need. Well, now it is possible not only in theory.

To create a compact backup you should use
innobackupex --compact
and it will create a backup where all InnoDB tables contain only Primary Keys and not secondary.
It allows to safe some space on a backup storage. How much? Well, it depends on how many indexes you have.
…

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.1.67-14.3 on January 23rd, 2013 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories).

Based on MySQL 5.1.67, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.1.67-14.3 is now the current stable release in the 5.1 series. All of Percona‘s software is open-source and free, all the details of the release can be found in the 5.1.67-14.3 milestone at Launchpad.

Bugs Fixed:

• Fixed …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.5.29-29.4 on January 23rd, 2012 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories).

Based on MySQL 5.5.29, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.5.29-29.4 is now the current stable release in the 5.5 series. All of Percona‘s software is open-source and free, all the details of the release can be found in the 5.5.29-29.4 milestone at Launchpad.

Bugs Fixed:

• Fixed …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraBackup 2.0.5 on January 23rd, 2012. Downloads are available from our download site here and Percona Software Repositories.

This release is the current GA (Generally Available) stable release in the 2.0 series.

New Features:

• New option --defaults-extra-file has been introduced. This option specifies from what extra file to read the default MySQL options before the standard defaults-file. It can be used to load the user/password combination for the dedicated backup user from a separate configuration file, to avoid storing it in the crontab or a script somewhere in the system.

Bugs Fixed:

• In case of …

Percona Server Wins Developer Week 2013 Award; Named Top Innovator in SQL Technologies Category

Percona Server has won a 2013 DeveloperWeek Best of Tech award, being named Top Innovator in the SQL Technologies category!

We’re proud to accept this award, which is determined by a combination of peer voting and review from an independent panel of judges. Thank you to everyone who voted for Percona Server!

From our press release: According to a 451 Research report titled, “MySQL vs. NoSQL and NewSQL: 2011-2015,” Percona …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.1.66-14.2 on January 15th, 2013 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories).

Based on MySQL 5.1.66, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.1.66-14.2 is now the current stable release in the 5.1 series. All of Percona‘s software is open-source and free, all the details of the release can be found in the 5.1.66-14.2 milestone at Launchpad.

New Features:

…

In preparing Percona Server 5.5.29 (not yet released, but soon), I filed MySQL bug 68045 (is marked private as it’s a security bug). This bug is in relation to the Oracle fix for CVE-2012-4414 and a problem I found with it. The MariaDB fix (which we incorporated into Percona Server 5.5.28-29.3) is not affected.

When the MariaDB team fixed CVE-2012-4414 they created a test case named rpl_mdev382.test which can be …