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 …