mysql 5.0.51 to percona 5.5 on ubuntu 8.04

[ppcnseo]

I am looking into upgrading from mysql 5.0 to percona 5.5

This will be on a production server but being cloud based I can easily spin up a testbed.

I experimented before installing percona on another machine and failed to even get it running - however its possible I was trying on 11.04 which appears unsupported. The servers are all 8.04.

I understand that the process is to stop mysql, start percona and then run mysql_upgrade.
Is it possible to install percona alongside mysql when installing from the repositories or would this need to be a manual install?

Roughly how long is mysql_upgrade expected to take on a machine with around 8GB in 200 databases?

Does Percona include innodb and extradb or would all innodb tables get upgraded automatically?

Any other concerns or considerations to be aware of?

[revin]

Because of dependencies, you cannot install Percona Server alongside MySQL from the repositories, this will be a manual install if you want separate instances or remove MySQL first. Once the binaries are upgraded you should run mysql_upgrade.

How long it takes to complete mysql_upgrade is hard to tell. If that 8GB are mostly InnoDB, then much of the work will be table checks,

Percona-Server includes XtraDB, this is the drop in replacement for InnoDB - you do not have to do anything to you InnoDB tables. After the upgrade your InnoDB tables will actually be using XtraDB. Hint: SHOW ENGINES

Since you are able to spin up a testbed: this will be your best first step so you have an idea of what it takes completely to do the upgrade.

[ppcnseo]

Hi Thanks for your help.

I decided to run the upgrade on our slave server after taking a full backup so that I could restore if needed.

First step I removed mysql and then ran sudo apt-get install percona-server-server-5.5

I encountered issues after installation but analysis of the logs showed that I needed to comment out some unsupported entries in /etc/mysql/my.cnf
skip-bdb was the major culprit.

After this mysql started and I ran mysql_upgrade -u root -p
This upgrade took around 1 hour 20 minutes on a cloud machine with 256MB of RAM.
The first part of the upgrade was very quick but then it ran out of RAM and crawled along.

Next step is to test and schedule an upgrade for the master server.