According to the Percona website, Percona is a free, fully compatible, enhanced, open source, and drop-in replacement for MySQL that provides superior performance, scalability, and instrumentation.
Percona is a fork of MySQL with enhanced features for performance. All the features available in MySQL are available in Percona. Percona uses an enhanced storage engine called XtraDB. According to the Percona website, it is an enhanced version of the InnoDB storage engine for MySQL that has more features, faster performance, and better scalability on modern hardware. Percona XtraDB uses memory more efficiently in high-load environments.
As mentioned earlier, XtraDB is a fork of InnoDB, so all the features available in InnoDB are available in XtraDB.
Percona is only available for Linux systems. It is not available for Windows as of now. In this book, we will install Percona Server on Debian 8. The process is same for both Ubuntu and Debian.
To install the Percona Server on other Linux flavors, check out the Percona installation manual at https://www.percona.com/doc/percona-server/5.5/installation.html. As of now, they provide instructions for Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, and RHEL. They also provide instructions to install the Percona Server from sources and Git.
Now, let's install the Percona Server through the following steps:
sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list
If prompted for a password, enter your Debian password. The file will be opened.
sources.list file:deb http://repo.percona.com/apt jessie main deb-src http://repo.percona.com/apt jessie main
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install percona-server-server-5.5