Percona XtraBackup 2.4.5 is now available

Percona announces the GA release of Percona XtraBackup 2.4.5 on November 29th, 2016. You can download it from our download site and from apt and yum repositories.

Percona XtraBackup enables MySQL backups without blocking user queries, making it ideal for companies with large data sets and mission-critical applications that cannot tolerate long periods of downtime. Offered free as an open source solution, Percona XtraBackup drives down backup costs while providing unique features for MySQL backups.

New features:

• Percona XtraBackup now supports SHA256 passwords. Using the SHA256 algorithm requires either SSL encrypted connection, or using public key encryption for password exchange which is only available when both client and server are linked with OpenSSL.
• Percona XtraBackup now supports Command Options for Secure Connections.
• NOTE: Due to xbcrypt format changes, backups encrypted with this Percona XtraBackup version will not be recoverable by older versions.

Bugs fixed:

• Percona XtraBackup would crash while preparing the backup, during the shutdown, when the master thread was performing a checkpoint and purge thread was expecting that all other threads completed or were idle. Bug fixed #1618555.
• Safe slave backup algorithm performed too short delays between retries which could cause backups to fail on a busy server. Bug fixed #1624473.
• Percona XtraBackup didn’t check the logblock checksums. Bug fixed #1633448.
• Fixed new compilation warnings with GCC 6. Bug fixed #1641612.
• xbcrypt was not setting the Initialization Vector (IV) correctly (and thus is was not using an IV). This was causing the same ciphertext to be generated across different runs (for the same message/same key). The IV provides the extra randomness to ensure that the same ciphertext is not generated across runs. Bug fixed #1643949.
• target-dir was no longer relative to the current directory but to datadir instead. Bug fixed #1611568.
• Backup would still succeed even if xtrabackup would fail to write the metadata. Bug fixed #1623210.
• xbcloud now supports EMC ECS Swift API Authorization requests. Bugs fixed #1638017 and #1638020 (Txomin Barturen).
• Some older versions of MySQL did not bother to initialize page type field for pages which are not index pages (see upstream #76262 for more information). Having this page type uninitialized could cause xtrabackup to crash on prepare. Bug fixed #1641426.
• Percona XtraBackup would fail to backup MariaDB 10.2 with the unsupported server version error message. Bug fixed #1602842.

Other bugs fixed: #1639764, #1639767, #1641596, and #1641601.

Release notes with all the bugfixes for Percona XtraBackup 2.4.5 are available in our online documentation. Please report any bugs to the launchpad bug tracker.