Percona Welcomes MySQL 5.6!

MySQL 5.6 was made generally available as a production-ready solution earlier this month. This release comes about 2 years after MySQL 5.5 was released, but MySQL 5.6 contains improvements started long before that – for example, work on the Innodb Full Text Search project was started over 6 years ago, in addition with many optimizer and replication features. We’re happy to congratulate MySQL development team at Oracle with making this release happen.

In this blog post, I will not go into a features overview of MySQL 5.6. You can check out Release Notes for a good overview as well as many blog posts and articles written on this matter. Instead, I will tell you what is the current state of things with MySQL 5.6 at Percona.

Percona’s Services for MySQL 5.6

In addition to Percona Server, Percona XtraDB Cluster, MariaDB, Amazon RDS for MySQL, Drizzle, and Oracle MySQL, MySQL 5.6 is fully supported by our MySQL Consulting, MySQL Support, MySQL Server Development, and MySQL Remote DBA teams:

• • Our MySQL Consulting Team and MySQL Support Team can work together to audit your current system; assess how to re-architect, develop, and tune your application to take advantage of MySQL 5.6’s features; create an in-depth upgrade plan; help design and deploy new applications to bring new benefits to your customers; and, then help support your environment while providing bug fixes and enhancements.

• • Our MySQL Server Development Team is ready to help you with code level issues such as compatibility, porting plugins and other code you might have from previous MySQL versions to MySQL 5.6, and other issues.

• • Our MySQL Remote DBA Team is ready to monitor, maintain, and fine tune our customers’ MySQL 5.6 test and production environments, and address any performance issues that might arise.

• • Our MySQL Training team is working on updating materials to include MySQL 5.6, and is already ready to provide custom private training covering MySQL 5.6

Percona Open Source Software MySQL 5.6 Integration

From a product perspective, we’re working hard towards MySQL 5.6 integration with Percona Software.

• • Percona Toolkit 2.1 already supports MySQL 5.6. Improved support is coming in Percona Toolkit 2.2 which will be released soon.

• • Percona Monitoring Plugins are also MySQL 5.6 compatible.

• • Percona Xtrabackup support for MySQL 5.6 is coming next month with Percona Xtrabackup 2.0.6. Though used more for final integration and testing questions, we have customers backing up and restoring MySQL 5.6 databases in standard configuration successfully with the current version.

The largest focus of our development effort is in getting the production version of Percona Server 5.6 released, followed by the Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6 release. We’re very excited about the Percona Server 5.6 release which will contain all MySQL 5.6 features, as well as Percona’s additions and optimizations. MySQL 5.6 rolls many improvements which previously existed only in Percona Server into MySQL 5.6 mainline which means we will have less code to maintain and can focus on more valuable features and optimizations.

Learn More About MySQL 5.6

If you’re interested in learning more about MySQL 5.6, the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo is a great chance to do so. MySQL 5.6 will be well covered in talks, Birds of a Feather sessions, and hallway conversations.

As always, please check our blog on a regular basis for Percona product release announcements and to share our experience working with 5.6. In addition, you can subscribe to our new monthly technical newsletter, which conveniently summarizes all new software releases and popular blog posts. We are also scheduling many webinars focused on MySQL 5.6, including one I will be giving on March 6 called “MySQL 5.6 Advantages in a Nutshell.”

At Percona, we’re ready for MySQL 5.6! Are you? We can help!