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 new variables in SHOW STATUS, as well as name changes to command-line options and SHOW VARIABLES variables. And Fred Linhoss committed some English-editing changes to awkwardly worded and badly spelled error messages and the like.
- There is work afoot to get Percona Server packages included in Ubuntu.
- There was discussion about changing the column names in the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.QUERY_RESPONSE_TIME table, because their meaning is vague and hard to understand without referring to the documentation.
- There was discussion about making innodb_file_per_table a session variable.
- There was discussion on a bug that makes the INDEX_STATISTICS and TABLE_STATISTICS tables under-report by 1 the number of rows read from XtraDB tables, which means that single-row lookups don’t increment the counters at all.
- Mark Callaghan found a bug in INFORMATION_SCHEMA.INNODB_SYS_TABLES in the 5.1 server code.
Percona XtraBackup news:
- In general, demand for and usage of XtraBackup continues to grow extremely quickly, and innobackupex is becoming more and more of an issue. (It is very poor quality, which makes it have a lot of problems that are essentially unfixable. Oracle has already moved away from using its ancestor, innobackup, and XtraBackup needs to do the same too.)
- There was a confirmed and high-priority request to provide Windows packages for XtraBackup.
- XtraBackup tests were augmented: more server versions, tests for export/import, tests for partitioned tables.
- Bug reported: when filtering by table name, innobackupex doesn’t back up all *.par files for partitions. Also, a few other nuisance usability and functionality bugs were discussed for innobackupex.
- There was discussion about making tar4ibd support InnoDB’s compressed tables.
A somewhat OT question: are there any statistics on whether (and which) Percona patches propagate back to MySQL, MariaDB, etc.? And vice-versa? Is that still possible (for the server), or are the different servers diverting fast? I suppose users have their favorite server packages which they would use whatever a certain patch’s propagation status, nevertheless, it’d still be interesting if the release teams could agree on a common place to compare their products.
The different branches really have quite different and legitimate purposes and goals. Although Oracle has done a great job with the 5.5 release, and MySQL remains open-source and free software, I don’t know whether they are interested in merging any of our changes back upstream.