Question :
I’m really sorry if my question is kind of very basic, but is something that is really making me thinking a lot about it for a long time. As Percona has a lot of lines of optimizing codes, I run it instead of standard MySQL. I’ve always been running Percona 5.5 with no problems. However, I’d like to update to version 5.6 in order to get a plugin that uses fulltext search working in my InnoDB (as InnoDB supports FULLTEXT in newest MySQL 5.6 versions. I have two (2) options:
1) Remove Percona and install MySQL 5.6.10 (the standard version)
2) Install Percona 5.6 alpha version, that also will allow me to use the plugin that requires fulltext in my tables that run InnoDB.
I’d like to know from anyone who knows more than me if is it safe to use this Percona 5.6 version. Nowadays I am running Percona 5.5 in my server that runs only WordPress, and I don’t want to stop using Percona, but don’t want something that can make me lose any data (is it possible as Percona 5.6 is new?).
Thank you all for the attention.
Answer :
Big Percona fan here. I’m really excited about a lot of 5.6 features (although many seem to be things Percona already provided). At the same time there’s no way i’m rolling out an alpha into production and no way I’m going back to stock and loosing thing I get from percona 5.5 Largely I suppose those “things” are related to information schema (which is just for my DBA satisfaction; not performance implications) as well as knowing I have a trusted xtrabackup situation going on w/ percona builds.
I’m personally waiting for Percona’s 5.6 GA before even deploying to QA for evaluation.
As for the fulltext feature you’re wanting I’m of the opinion search like that is not the role of a relational database and should be delegated to a lucene solution such as an in house elastic search install, or searchify for a cloud based solution if you don’t have the resources to manage your own search service.
My opinion on your implementation isn’t really an answer though, so to get to that more directly: Do not deploy alphas to production. Alpha is the disclaimer saying “play around if you like but we’re not sure we trust what we’ve built yet ourselves”