Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6 GA release now available

Percona is pleased to announce the first General Availability release of the leading open source High Availability solution for MySQL, Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6 on January 30, 2014. Binaries are available from downloads area or from our software repositories.

Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6
Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6 is an active/active cluster solution for High Availability (HA) MySQL that delivers performance and MySQL-based cluster management features available nowhere else. This free, open source solution combines Percona Server (a drop-in MySQL replacement), Galera, wsrep API, and Percona XtraBackup, in a single package that’s easier to deploy and manage than the various approaches to MySQL replication. Applications that require high availability will benefit from this combination of the latest versions of these software solutions to deliver cost-effective, high performance based on the latest features and fixes available in Percona Server 5.6, Galera 3, wsrep API 25, and Percona XtraBackup 2.1.

Percona XtraDB Cluster expert Jay Janssen will present a webinar titled “What’s New in Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6” on February 5 at 1PM EST/10AM PST to talk about some of the new features and upgrade strategies and to answer your questions. Alexey Yurchenko, solutions architect from Codership, will join Jay to contribute additional insights on Galera and the Percona XtraDB Cluster solution.

Percona Server 5.6
As our previous performance analysis demonstrates, MySQL 5.6 was a big step forward from MySQL 5.5. However, Percona Server 5.6 yields significantly better results than MySQL 5.6 in IO-bound cases. The ThreadPool feature in Percona Server 5.6 delivers performance advantages over MySQL 5.6 with as few as 150 concurrent threads and up to 4x better performance as concurrent threads grow into the 1,000s. ThreadPool efficiency improvements in Percona Server 5.6 have even shown to deliver similar gains over MariaDB 10.0.7 in transactional workload scenarios.

Other Percona Server 5.6 features that benefit Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6 include:

• Expanded diagnostics capability which reveals new insights into user activity with Performance Schema and User Stats features as well as query activity with the Slow Query Log
• Support for greater control of the end-user experience with the integration of the Statement Timeout feature from Twitter’s MySQL contributions

Galera 3
Galera from Codership provides synchronous replication for greater data consistency. The latest version, Galera 3, includes new features and fixes to minimize replication traffic between WAN segments, improved memory performance, greater data integrity, and improved data throughput.

Percona XtraBackup 2.1
Adding new nodes and recovering failed nodes is an important part of managing a high availability MySQL cluster. Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6 now defaults to use Percona XtraBackup 2.1 to transfer node state for these processes. Though Galera supports other choices, Percona XtraBackup 2.1 is the best option because it:

• Has the fastest State Snapshot Transfers (SST) with parallel, compressed, and compacted options
• Is highly secure with industry standard AES multi-threaded data encryption available

Drop-in Compatibility
Percona XtraDB Cluster has Percona Server at its core so it is drop-in compatible with MySQL. As a result, upgrades to Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6 are straightforward from a variety of platforms including:

• Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.5
• Percona Server 5.6
• Percona Server 5.5
• MySQL 5.6
• MySQL 5.5
• MariaDB 5.5

Follow our upgrade steps for moving to Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6 with no downtime.

Additional Help
You can download the operations manual now at the Percona XtraDB Cluster page on percona.com. Community-based help is available for Percona XtraDB Cluster in the Percona Community Forums.

Commercial help with Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.5 and 5.6 is available from the Percona Consulting team. The Percona Support team offers optional coverage for Percona XtraDB Cluster. The Percona Remote DBA team can provide outsourced management of Percona XtraDB Cluster deployments.

All of Percona’s software is open-source and free. Details of the release can be found in the 5.6.15-25.3 milestone at Launchpad and in the release notes.

New Features

• New meta packages are now available in order to make the Percona XtraDB Cluster installation easier.
• Debian/Ubuntu debug packages are now available for Galera and garbd.
• xtrabackup-v2 SST now supports the GTID replication.

Bugs Fixed

• Node would get stuck and required restart if DDL was performed after FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK. Bug fixed #1265656.
• Galera provider pause has been fixed to avoid potential deadlock with replicating threads.
• Default value for variable binlog_format is now ROW. This is done so that Percona XtraDB Cluster is not started with wrong defaults leading to non-deterministic outcomes like crash. Bug fixed #1243228.
• During the installation of percona-xtradb-cluster-garbd-3.x package, Debian tries to start it, but as the configuration is not set, it would fail to start and leave the installation in iF state. Bug fixed #1262171.
• Runtime checks have been added for dynamic variables which are Galera incompatible. Bug fixed #1262188.
• During the upgrade process, parallel applying could hit an unresolvable conflict when events were replicated from Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.5 to Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6. Bug fixed #1267494.
• xtrabackup-v2 is now used as default SST method. Bug fixed #1268837.
• FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK behavior on the same connection was changed to conform to MySQL behavior. Bug fixed #1269085.
• Read-only detection has been added in clustercheck, which can be helpful during major upgrades (this is used by xinetd for HAProxy etc.) Bug fixed #1269469.
• Binary log directory is now being cleanup as part of the XtraBackup SST. Bug fixed #1273368.
• First connection would hang after changing the wsrep_cluster_address variable. Bug fixed #1022250.
• When gmcast.listen_addr variable was set manually it did not allow nodes own address in gcomm address list. Bug fixed #1099478.
• GCache file allocation could fail if file size was a multiple of page size. Bug fixed #1259952.
• Group remerge after partitioning event has been fixed. Bug fixed #1232747.
• Fixed multiple build bugs: #1262716, #1269063, #1269351, #1272723, #1272732, and #1253055.

Other bugs fixed: #1273101, #1272961, #1271264, and #1253055.

We did our best to eliminate bugs and problems during the testing release, but this is a software, so bugs are expected. If you encounter them, please report them to our bug tracking system.