Percona Server 5.5.8 Beta Release

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 be spread across multiple partitions (see Multiple Adaptive Hash Search Partitions. Bug fixed: #688866. (Yasufumi Kinoshita)
• Information from SHOW INNODB STATUS was made available in new status variables in InnoDB Show Status. Bug fixed:#698797.

Variable Changes

• New variable innodb_adaptive_flushing_method was added.
• New variable innodb_use_global_flush_log_at_trx_commit was added. Bug fixed: #635399. (Yasufumi Kinoshita)
• New variable log_warnings_silence replaced old variable suppress_log_warning_1592. Bug fixed: #692413. (Oleg Tsarev)
• Old variable innodb_adaptive_checkpoint was deleted. Bug fixed: #689450. (Yasufumi Kinoshita)
• Old variable innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit_session was deleted. Bug fixed: #635399. (Yasufumi Kinoshita)
• Old variable use_global_long_query_time was deleted. (Oleg Tsarev) Bug fixed: #692415.
• Old variable innodb_ibuf_accel_rate was renamed to innodb_ibuf_merge_rate. Bug fixed: #695906 (Yasufumi Kinoshita)
• Old variable innodb_ibuf_active_contract was renamed to innodb_ibuf_active_merge. Bug fixed: #695906 (Yasufumi Kinoshita)
• Old variable enable_query_response_time_stats was renamed to query_response_time_stats. (Oleg Tsarev)
• Existing variable log_slow_verbosity had two new values added:profiling and profiling_use_getrusage. (Oleg Tsarev)
• Existing variables profiling_server and profiling_use_getrusage were merged into the Slow Query Log page. (Oleg Tsarev)

Other Changes

• Additional information was added to the LOG section of the SHOW STATUS command. Bug fixed: #693269. (Yasufumi Kinoshita)
• The SHOW PATCHES command was removed. (Vadim Tkachenko)
• The INFORMATION_SCHEMA table XTRADB_ENHANCEMENTS was removed. (Yasufumi Kinoshita)
• Several fields in the INFORMATION_SCHEMA table INNODB_INDEX_STATS were renamed. Bug fixed: #691777. (Yasufumi Kinoshita)
• The XtraDB version was set to 20.0. (Aleksandr Kuzminsky)
• Many InnoDB compilation warnings were fixed. Bug fixed:#695273. (Yasufumi Kinoshita)
• An Amazon OS repository was created. Bug fixed: #691996. (Aleksandr Kuzminsky)

For more information, please see the following links:

• Downloads — binary distributions and Percona Software Repositories
• Installation instructions
• Consulting, support, training, and custom development
• Release notes
• Documentation
• Developer discussion group