LTS and Innovation Releases for Percona Server for MySQL

Posted on July 31, 2023 by Design in Design Innovation | 0 Comments

LTS and Innovation releases for Percona MySQL

On July 18th, Oracle released its first pair of MySQL LTS and Innovation releases. (For more, check out A Quick Peek at MySQL 8.0.34 and MySQL 8.1.0.) These releases were announced several months ago and gradually detailed closer to the release date. Today, we know from Oracle’s official blog post what to expect, as well as what the cadence and scope of the upcoming releases will be.

So, the next immediate question that comes to mind is: Is Percona going to follow the same release pattern as “upstream“ MySQL?

The short answer is “yes.”

We are proud to say that over the last several years, Percona delivered on its promise of providing the MySQL community a drop-in replacement that offers enterprise features without vendor lock-in.

The key word is “drop-in,” which means that over the years, we have made an effort to keep Percona Server for MySQL fully compatible with its upstream counterpart from Oracle. In simple terms, you can replace the binaries of MySQL Community Edition with Percona Server for MySQL, and, provided that you use the same version (major and minor), Percona software will smoothly pick up where the Community Edition left off.

Our goal is to continue on that path. That means you can expect to see the equivalent releases of MySQL following the patterns of LTS and Innovation releases and following the same support lifecycle. You can expect these releases to be available within several weeks of the upstream releases.

That leads to another question: Will other components of Percona Distribution for MySQL follow the same release patterns?

Percona Distribution for MySQL is a compilation of several open source products, the most notable being Percona Server for MySQL, Percona XtraBackup, and Percona XtraDB Cluster. We are determined to make sure every element of Percona Distribution for MySQL is fully compatible with both LTS and Innovation releases.

At the moment, we are unclear whether it will be necessary to issue separate new versions of the packages for each Innovation release. This will greatly depend on the level of backward- compatibility-breaking changes introduced in each release. But at the very least, we will make it clear which LTS and Innovation releases Percona Distribution for MySQL is compatible with.