Percona Server for MySQL 5.7.21-21 Is Now Available with Increased Built-In Security Enhancements

Percona announces the GA release of Percona Server for MySQL 5.7.21-21 on on April 24, 2018. Download the latest version from the Percona web site or the Percona Software Repositories. You can also run Docker containers from the images in the Docker Hub repository.

This version of Percona Server for MySQL 5.7.21 includes three new encryption features – Vault keyring plug-in, encryption for InnoDB general tablespaces, and encryption for binary log files.

These new capabilities, which allow companies to immediately increase security for their existing databases, are also part of a larger project to build complete, robust, enterprise-grade encryption capabilities into Percona Server for MySQL, allowing customers and the community to satisfy their most rigorous security compliance requirements. Percona also announced the release of a new version of Percona XtraBackup that supports backing up Percona Server for MySQL instances that have these encryption features enabled.

Based on MySQL 5.7.21, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server for MySQL 5.7.21-21 is the current GA release in the Percona Server for MySQL 5.7 series. Percona provides completely open-source and free software.

New Features:

• A new variable innodb_temp_tablespace_encrypt is introduced to turn encryption of temporary tablespace and temporary InnoDB file-per-table tablespaces on/off. Bug fixed #3821.
• A new variable innodb_encrypt_online_alter_logs simultaneously turns on encryption of files used by InnoDB for merge sort, online DDL logs, and temporary tables created by InnoDB for online DDL. Bug fixed #3819.
• A new variable innodb_encrypt_tables can be set to ON, making InnoDB tables encrypted by default, to FORCE, disabling creation of unencrypted tables, or OFF, restoring the like-before behavior. Bug fixed #1525.
• Query response time plugin now can be disabled at session level with use of a new variable query_response_time_session_stats.

Bugs Fixed:

• Attempting to use a partially-installed query response time plugin could have caused server crash. Bug fixed #3959.
• There was a server crash caused by a materialized temporary table from semi-join optimization with key length larger than 1000 bytes. Bug fixed #296.
• A regression in the original 5.7 port was causing integer overflow with thread_pool_stall_limit variable values bigger than 2 seconds. Bug fixed #1095.
• A memory leak took place in Percona Server when performance schema is used in conjunction with thread pooling. Bug fixed #1096.
• A code clean-up was done to fix compilation with clang, both general warnings (bug fixed #3814, upstream #89646) and clang 6 specific warnings and errors (bug fixed #3893, upstream #90111).
• Compilation warning was fixed for -DWITH_QUERY_RESPONSE_TIME=ON CMake compilation option, which makes QRT to be linked statically. Bug fixed #3841.
• Percona Server returned empty result for SELECT query if number of connections exceeded 65535. Bug fixed #314 (upstream #89313).
• A clean-up in Percona Server binlog-related code was made to avoid uninitialized memory comparison. Bug fixed #3925 (upstream #90238).
• mysqldump utility with --innodb-optimize-keys option was incorrectly working with foreign keys on the same table, producing invalid SQL statements. Bugs fixed #1125 and #3863.
• A fix of the mysqld startup script failed to detect jemalloc library location for preloading, thus not starting on systemd based machines, introduced in Percona Server 5.7.21-20, was improved to take into account previously created configuration file. Bug fixed #3850.
• The possibility of a truncated bitmap file name was fixed in InnoDB logging subsystem. Bug fixed #3926.
• Temporary file I/O was not instrumented for Performance Schema. Bug fixed #3937 (upstream #90264).
• A crash in the unsafe query warning checks with views took place for UPDATE statement in case of statement binlogging format. Bug fixed #290.

MyRocks Changes:

• A re-implemented variable rpl_skip_tx_api allows to turn on simple RocksDB write batches functionality, increasing replication performance by the transaction api skip. Bug fixed MYR-47.
• Decoding value-less padded varchar fields could under some circumstances cause assertion and/or data corruption. Bug fixed MYR-232.

TokuDB Changes:

• Two new variables introduced for the TokuDB fast updates feature, tokudb_enable_fast_update and tokudb_enable_fast_upsert should be now used instead of the NOAR keyword, which is now optional at compile time and off by default. Bugs fixed #63 and #148.
• A set of compilation fixes was introduced to make TokuDB successfully build in MySQL / Percona Server 8.0. Bugs fixed #84, #85, #114, #115, #118, #128, #139, #141, and #172.
• Conditional compilation code dependent on version ID in the TokuDB tree was separated and arranged to specific version branches. Bugs fixed #133, #134, #135, and #136.
• ALTER TABLE ... COMMENT = ... statement caused TokuDB to rebuild the whole table, which is not needed, as only FRM metadata should be changed. Bug fixed #130, and #137.
• Data race on the cache table pair attributes was fixed.

Other bugs fixed: #3793, #3812, #3813, #3815, #3818, #3835, #3875 (upstream #89916), #3843 (upstream #89822), #3848, #3856, #3887, MYR-160, MYR-245, #109, #111,#180, #181, #182, and #188.

The release notes for Percona Server for MySQL 5.7.21-20 are available in the online documentation. Please report any bugs on the project bug tracking system.

[2018-04-26 – UPDATE:] CentOS 6 and CentOS 7 packages were affected by PS-3971 where my.cnf configuration file would be replaced by a symlink. These packages (5.7.21-21.1) were removed from the repos, and new packages (5.7.21-21.3) with the fix have been deployed later today.