Percona has released Percona Server for MySQL 8.0 as Generally Available (GA). Our Percona Server for MySQL 8.0 software is the company’s free, enhanced, drop-in replacement for MySQL Community Edition. Percona Server for MySQL 8.0 includes all of the great features in MySQL Community Edition 8.0. It also includes enterprise-class features from Percona made available free and open source. Percona Server for MySQL is trusted by thousands of enterprises to meet their need for a mature, proven, cost-effective MySQL solution that delivers excellent performance and reliability.
Downloads are available on the Percona Website and in the Percona Software Repositories.
Features in Percona Server for MySQL 8.0
Percona Server for MySQL 8.0 includes all of the features available in MySQL 8.0 Community Edition in addition to enterprise-grade features developed by Percona for the community.
MySQL Community Edition 8.0 Features
Some of the highlights from MySQL 8.0 contained in Percona Server for MySQL 8.0 include:
- MySQL Document Store—Combining NoSQL functionality within the X API along with JSON enhancements such as new operators and functions enables developers to use MySQL 8.0 for non-relational data storage without the need for a separate NoSQL database.
- Stronger SQL—With the addition of Window Functions, Common Table Expressions, Unicode safe Regular Expressions, and other improvements MySQL 8.0 provide broader support for the range of SQL standard functionality.
- Transactional Data Dictionary—Enables atomic and crash-safe DDL operations, enhancing reliability, and eliminating the need for metadata files.
- Security—SQL Roles, SHA2 default authentication, fine-grained privileges, and other enhancements make MySQL 8.0 more secure and adaptable to your organization’s compliance needs.
- Geospatial—New SRS aware spatial data types, spatial indexes, and spatial functions, enabling the use of MySQL 8.0 for complex GIS use-cases.
Percona Server for MySQL 8.0 Features
Building on the upstream MySQL 8.0 Community Edition, Percona Server for MySQL 8.0 brings many great features in this release, including the following:
- Security and Compliance:
- Audit Logging Plugin: Provides monitoring and logging of database activity to assist organizations in meeting their compliance objectives. This feature is comparable to MySQL Enterprise Auditing.
- PAM-based Authentication Plugin: Assists enterprises in integrating Percona Server for MySQL with their single sign-on (SSO) and two-factor authentication (2FA) systems by integrating with standard PAM modules. This feature is comparable to MySQL Enterprise Authentication.
- Enhanced Encryption: Improves upon Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) present in MySQL Community Edition. Enhanced encryption adds support for binary log encryption, temporary file encryption, encryption support for all InnoDB tablespace types and logs, encryption of the parallel doublewrite buffer, key rotation, and support for centralized key management using Hashicorp Vault. Please Note: Some of the encryption features are still considered experimental and are not yet suitable for production use. These features together are comparable to MySQL Enterprise TDE.
- Performance and Scalability:
- Threadpool: Supporting 10000+ connections, this feature provides significant performance benefits under heavy load. This feature is comparable to MySQL Enterprise Scalability.
- InnoDB Engine Enhancements: Enables highly concurrent IO-bound workloads to see significant performance improvements through parallel doublewrite, multithreaded LRU flushers, and single page eviction. In a simple benchmark, we saw a 60% performance improvement in some workloads when comparing Percona Server for MySQL to MySQL Community Edition
- MyRocks Storage Engine: Based on the RocksDB storage library, MyRocks brings MySQL into the 21st century by being optimized for modern hardware such as nVME SSDs. Utilizing strong compression, MyRocks reduces write-amplification and storage requirements on SSDs compared to InnoDB to lower TCO and increase ROI when working with large datasets. Improved throughput consistency compared to InnoDB enables scaling cloud resources for your databases more strategically.
- Observability and Usability:
- Improved Instrumentation: Percona Server for MySQL 8.0 offers more than double the available performance and stats counters compared to MySQL Community Edition, as well as support for gathering per-user and per-thread statistics, and extended slow query logging capabilities. Together with free tools like Percona Monitoring and Management these enhancements enable your DBAs to troubleshoot issues faster and effectively improve your application performance.
- Reduced Backup Impact: Lighter weight Backup Locking reduces the impact to performance and availability of performing backups. This feature makes your backups run faster and your applications perform better during long-running backups when used together with Percona XtraBackup 8.0.
Features Removed in Percona Server for MySQL 8.0
Some features were not ported forward from Percona Server for MySQL 5.7 to Percona Server for MySQL 8.0. Features which are unused, have something comparable included upstream, or are no longer relevant in this major release have been removed. For more information see our documentation.
- Slow Query Log Rotation and Expiration: Not widely used, can be accomplished using
logrotate - CSV engine mode for standard-compliant quote and comma parsing
- Expanded program option modifiers
- The
ALL_O_DIRECTInnoDB flush method: it is not compatible with the new redo logging implementation XTRADB_RSEGtable removed fromINFORMATION_SCHEMA- InnoDB memory size information from
SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS;the same information is available from Performance Schema memory summary tables - Query cache enhancements: The query cache is no longer present in MySQL 8.0
Features Being Deprecated in Percona Server for MySQL 8.0
- TokuDB Storage Engine: TokuDB will be supported throughout the Percona Server for MySQL 8.0 release series, but will not be available in the next major release. Percona encourages TokuDB users to explore the MyRocks Storage Engine which provides similar benefits for the majority of workloads and has better optimized support for modern hardware.
I am a little bit sad that Tokudb is discontinued.
I built quite a few data warehouses with it and recommended to clients as well.
Howdy Jonathan,
To clarify a little bit. TokuDB is present in Percona Server for MySQL 8.0 and has some enhancements, such as the addition of Native Partitioning. Percona Server for MySQL 8.0 series doesn’t EOL until 2026, so TokuDB is not going away immediately and will continue to be supported fully by Percona until it does. It is our belief that MyRocks has advantages over TokuDB in similar use cases, is more generally applicable, and will continue to get further advantages as it matures. From a technical perspective, the advantages of LSM Trees over Fractal Trees are pretty clear, especially with large data set sizes.
For this release we made the decision to deprecate TokuDB, which means it will be removed from the following major release series. This will allow us to focus on advancing MyRocks and providing a path towards a future for MySQL to continue being a great database choice on modern extreme-performance hardware and for use cases with very large data sets.
Thanks!
Yes, I am also not happy on TokuDB is deprecating. I have been using TokuDB engine for 5 years. Actually it sounds bad news. Are you talking about that major version is Percona server 9.* or Percona server 8.1?
I’m very sad that TokuDB is deprecating. It was a major reason we were on Percona.
Please, focus your efforts on MyRocks. For our and MANY work cases, where we need compressed data, InnoDB is very lacking