Issue
I would like to replace MySQL 5.1 on my Debian Lenny 32-bit server to Percona Server with XtraDB. The main reason is better performance of Percona.
It's production server with many services running. Many other software may depend on mysql-client and other mysql shared libraries.
Is it safe to replace MySQL?
By "safe" I mean: 1. remove mysql, 2. install percona 3. everything works as before
Will it break dependencies in third party software? Will it require to change configuration of third party software (ie. socket path, server port, shared libraries path)? Will it require to install trillion of additional packages?
I really don't want situation with broken libraries, missing or incompatible header files and so on
Solution
We are currently in the process of upgrading from MySQL 4.1 to Percona Server 5.5 at work and Percona is as they say on their site a complete drop-in replacement for MySQL, the binaries use the same names, it uses the same libraries, same config file placement, takes the same parameters and it has exactly the same SQL syntax. They should also be data file compatible on the same version (MySQL 5.1 to Percona 5.1, etc) but it's nothing I've personally verified.
You are able to do an apt-get install percona-server-server-5.1 after adding their repositiories and it will automatically replace MySQL because it marks it as a conflicting package. But you must take an SQL dump of your database first, of course.
We currently have replication set up from a MySQL 4.1 master to a couple of Percona 5.5 slaves and have had no problems inserting SQL dumps either.
Answered By - mikn