Here’s what is new in Percona Server and Percona XtraBackup since last week. We are working on compiling and checking download statistics for both pieces of software. The preliminary numbers are far higher than I thought they would be. Both Percona Server and XtraBackup are becoming amazingly popular. I am aware of deployments running into multiple thousands of instances of Percona Server in some companies.

• Laurynas Biveinis joined the Percona Server project as a developer.
• We continued working on our upcoming Percona Server 5.5 stable release. Vadim has also spent a lot of time benchmarking against MySQL 5.5. Sorry, I can’t reveal how good the numbers are until the benchmarks are fully validated. Watch this blog for Vadim’s announcement.
• We began investigating the effort required to port Percona Server to Windows. We are interested in knowing how many people using MySQL on Windows would be ready to pay …

The xtrabackup compiled C binary (as distinct from XtraBackup, which is the combination of the C binary and the Perl script) has support for printing out stats on InnoDB tables and indexes. This can be useful to examine whether you’d benefit from “defragmenting” your MySQL database with OPTIMIZE TABLE, although I have not determined firm guidelines for when that will actually help. I’ve written a small Perl script that formats the stats output nicely to give an overview of fragmentation.

It’s an initial draft, and if you find issues with it I would like to know so I can fix them. The script is embedded in the documentation page and can be downloaded by clicking on the header at the top of the code listing. The output looks like this:

          TABLE           INDEX TOT_PAGES FREE_PAGES   PCT_FULL
art.link_out104 …

Welcome to the weekly roundup and progress report. What’s new this week in Percona Server:

• As you might have seen, we released Percona Server 5.1.55-12.6. This release also updated our repositories for Debian Squeeze.
• We’re enhancing the PROCESSLIST to include columns for rows examined, sent, and read. This can be useful for understanding how much progress a query has made, and potentially how long until it completes.
• Our 5.5 release is a release candidate at the moment. When it goes to stable status, several command-line options and configuration variables will be renamed. We did not always choose good names for variables and options, and this is the best time to fix that.
• We are working on a new adaptive flushing algorithm that should further improve the quality and consistency of …

Percona Server has a new logo:

Percona Server Logo

Other news for Percona Server:

• Many users noticed that our repositories don’t work for Debian Squeeze, the new version of Debian. Our repositories will support Squeeze on the next release, which will be based on MySQL 5.1.55.
• We merged a fix for InnoDB’s slow DROP TABLE performance. A new option, innodb_lazy_drop_table, controls this behavior.
• Vadim asked Yasufumi to look into porting the innodb_sync_checkpoint_limit feature from the Facebook patches into Percona Server.
• Peter requested a high priority for logging queries to the slow query log from a replica using row-based replication.
• Yasufumi reported a feature request for XtraDB to store statistics for the ::records_in_range() handler function, instead of accessing the data. This could improve performance for complex queries.
• A user on our …

It’s finally here! Percona Server Percona Server 5.5.8-20.0 is now available for download. This is a beta release of Percona’s enhancements to the MySQL 5.5.8 server. Here are some highlights:

• Performance and scalability improvements throughout the server and storage engine
• Optimizations for flash storage such as SSD, Virident, and FusionIO
• Optimizations for cloud computing
• The HandlerSocket plugin for NoSQL access
• There’s an Amazon OS repository, as well as Yum and Apt repositories
• Improvements to replication, partitioning, stored procedures
• More diagnostics and tunability
• More pluggability, including pluggable authentication

In addition to building on MySQL 5.5, here are the changes we’ve made from previous Percona Server releases:

New Features

• InnoDB adaptive hash function searches can now …

Here’s the second installment of the weekly Percona Server news roundup. There’s no team or personnel-related news, so let’s dive right in.

Percona Server news:

• We are working hard on the final touches to Percona Server based on MySQL 5.5! Watch for a release announcement.
• A user noticed that XtraDB doesn’t use native async I/O on Windows. This is a consequence of porting some patches that weren’t designed for Windows originally. Yasufumi promised to look at this later.

XtraBackup news:

• In general, there was a lot of activity on writing test cases and fixing (mostly obscure or usability-related) bugs.
• Peter proposed some optimizations for XtraBackup on systems with high I/O bandwidth.

It seems to be a “slow news week,” but there is a lot of work involved in some of those bullet points!

I decided to try a series of blog posts keeping people informed about what’s happening in Percona Server and Percona XtraBackup once a week. I’ll try to digest things, but it turns out to be hard — I want to provide details and links for everything, but then it isn’t really a digest anymore, so I cut out a lot of detail.

Team news in general:

• There is a new Quality Assurance Engineer, Valentine Gostev, reporting and handling bugs.
• There is a new Build Engineer, Ignacio Nin, who is handling packaging and other duties.
• Aleksandr Kuzminsky has moved out of the Build Engineer role and has transferred to the consulting team instead. (He’s one of Percona’s data recovery experts, among other things).

Percona Server news:

• Percona Server 5.5 release is nearing the final stages: Vadim Tkachenko asked Fred Linhoss to document a number of …