A new version of Percona Server has been released, claiming features equalling MySQL 5.6 Community Edition plus scalability, availability, backup, and security features found only in MySQL 5.6 Enterprise Edition.

Percona Server 5.6 is based on MySQL 5.6 Community Edition so it is fully drop-in compatible. It has a thread pool that promises high performance when multiple threads are active. This is similar to MySQL 5.6 Enterprise’s scalability from the InnoDB improvements. Percona says the new version removes many resource contentions that slow MySQL 5.6 Community Edition, so Percona Server 5.6 is able to use 150 concurrent threads and up to 4x better performance at 1,000 or more concurrent threads. It also has support for advanced clustering in the form of Percona XtraDB Cluster, which creates a high availability MySQL cluster.

Another new feature is support for incremental and hot backups when used with Percona XtraBackup. Fast Incremental Backups are bitmap-based backups that create incremental backups, faster than MySQL Enterprise Backup according to Percona. Archive Logs Backup allows users to keep a history of database changes for as long as is required, and if necessary apply those changes to a second copy of data.

Percona Server 5.6 matches the diagnostics capabilities of MySQL Community Edition Performance Schema, and adds a User Stats feature that provides insight into user, index, and table activity. It also has a Slow Query Log feature that can be fine-tuned to provide insights into query performance while minimizing system overhead.