PLEASANTON, CA--(Marketwired - Oct 8, 2013) - Percona, the company that unlocks optimal MySQL performance and reliability, today announced Percona Server 5.6, the latest release of the company's enhanced, drop-in replacement for MySQL. The new version offers all the improvements found in MySQL 5.6 Community Edition plus scalability, availability, backup, and security features found only in MySQL 5.6 Enterprise Edition, which requires a support contract from Oracle to access. The free download of Percona Server 5.6 also includes superior diagnostics and improved integration with other Percona software.

Feature Highlights

Enterprise-Grade Features and Greater Diagnostic Insight, for Free

• High Performance -- The Percona Thread Pool feature in Percona Server 5.6 ensures high performance when multiple threads are active, similar to MySQL 5.6 Enterprise Scalability.
• Powerful Backups -- Percona Server 5.6 can be used with Percona XtraBackup, which provides the same backup features available in MySQL 5.6 Enterprise Backup, including incremental backups and hot backups. But Percona XtraBackup provides additional features that are available only when using Percona Server 5.6.
• Advanced Clustering -- Percona Server 5.6 can easily be migrated to Percona XtraDB Cluster to create a high availability MySQL cluster. This capability is equivalent to MySQL 5.6 Enterprise High Availability.
• High Security -- Percona Server 5.6 includes the Percona PAM plugin, which delivers the same user security capabilities as MySQL 5.6 Enterprise Security.
• Sophisticated Diagnostics -- Percona Server 5.6 surpasses the diagnostics capabilities of MySQL Community Edition Performance Schema by matching its features plus including a User Stats feature that provides insight into user, index, and table activity. Percona Server 5.6 also has a Slow Query Log feature that can be fine-tuned to provide deep insight into query performance while minimizing system overhead.

Significant Performance Advantages
Percona Server 5.6 performance advantages enable databases to continue to run smoothly even when unexpected traffic spikes increase server load. Percona Server 5.6 performs better than MySQL 5.6 Community Edition, MariaDB 5.5, and Percona Server 5.5 in a variety of common use scenarios. By removing many resource contentions that slow MySQL 5.6 Community Edition, Percona Server 5.6 delivers better performance at more than 150 concurrent threads and up to 4x better performance at 1,000 or more concurrent threads. In addition, the Thread Pool feature in Percona Server 5.6 -- a capability available only in MySQL 5.6 Enterprise Edition -- provides significant performance gains over MySQL 5.6 Community Edition in intensive Read/Write environments.

More Powerful Backup Capabilities
When Percona Server 5.6 is used with Percona XtraBackup, backup features are enabled which are unavailable to other MySQL variants. Fast Incremental Backups is a bitmap based backup that creates incremental backups faster than MySQL Enterprise Backup. Archive Logs Backup allows users to keep a history of database changes for as long as they desire and apply these changes to a second copy of data.

More Advanced and More Current, but Fully Drop-in Compatible with MySQL 5.6
Percona Server 5.6 is based on MySQL 5.6 Community Edition so it is fully drop-in compatible. Percona Server also directly benefits from the coding and QA expertise of the MySQL server development team, resulting in consistently higher quality and performance. Future Percona Server 5.6 features will be refactored based on the then current version of MySQL 5.6 Community Edition so it will remain drop-in compatible. Percona Server 5.6 is also more up-to-date than MySQL 5.6 because Percona typically pushes out bug fixes and performance enhancements faster than Oracle. Because of this, many of the largest Internet companies rely on Percona Server and often pay Percona to develop new performance-related features, which are then released to the MySQL community in Percona Server. These enhancements are typically not incorporated into MySQL until the next major release. For example, many Percona Server 5.5 performance enhancements were never introduced in MySQL 5.5 Community Edition and instead appeared only in MySQL 5.6.

Quotes

Vadim Tkachenko, Co-founder and CTO for Percona
"Percona Server 5.6 is the best free MySQL variant for demanding applications. It includes many features, which are only available to MySQL 5.6 Enterprise Edition users. We also built upon the traditional strength of Percona Server to provide Percona Server 5.6 users with the best available performance for demanding workloads. The powerful features and high performance of Percona Server 5.6 plus its full drop-in compatibility with MySQL 5.6 Community Edition are all important reasons why Percona Server has been downloaded over 700,000 times since its launch."

Peter Zaitsev, Co-founder and CEO
"According to a 2013 survey by 451 Research, the total use of all varieties of MySQL will continue to grow dramatically. However, just 62% of survey respondents indicated they use MySQL from Oracle while 15% use Percona Server and use of MySQL from Oracle is expected to decline to 45% by 2018. Nearly 50 percent of the respondents were also more inclined towards alternative support providers. These survey results validate what we are hearing from our customers and our conference attendees. Companies like Percona deliver far greater value to the MySQL market, and with the release of Percona Server 5.6, we have again raised the bar."

Company Information

About Percona

Percona has made MySQL faster and more reliable for over 2,000 customers worldwide since 2006. Percona provides enterprise-grade MySQL Support, Consulting, Remote DBA, Training, and Server Development services to companies such as Cisco Systems, Alcatel-Lucent, Groupon, and the BBC. Percona's founders authored the definitive book High Performance MySQL from O'Reilly Press and the widely read MySQL Performance Blog. Percona also develops software for MySQL users, including Percona Server, Percona XtraBackup, Percona XtraDB Cluster, and Percona Toolkit. The popular Percona Live conferences draw attendees and acclaimed speakers from around the world. For more information, visit www.percona.com.

Percona® and XtraBackup® are registered trademarks of the Percona LLC or its subsidiaries. All other registered and unregistered trademarks in this document are the sole property of their respective owners.