Percona Server for MySQL is an ideal solution for running a database on the Azure Virtual machines. The Percona Server enables developers to quickly build, test, and deploy applications on Azure's highly scalable and reliable infrastructure. Percona Server for MySQL is a free, open source, fully-compatible drop-in replacement for any MySQL database. The Percona Server is trusted by thousands of organizations to provide better performance, and concurrency to their most demanding workloads. Users have access to an optimized performance, greater scalability and availability, enhanced backups, and increased visibility. List of features available in Percona Server for MySQL releases: * Improved Buffer Pool Scalability * Improved InnoDB I/O Scalability * Multiple Adaptive Hash Search Partitions * Atomic write support for Fusion-io devices * Thread Pool * Suppress Warning Messages * Ability to change the database for mysqlbinlog * Fixed Size for the Read Ahead Area * Improved MEMORY Storage Engine * Restricting the number of binlog files * Ignoring missing tables in mysqldump * Too Many Connections Warning * Handle Corrupted Tables * Lock-Free SHOW REPLICA STATUS * Expanded Fast Index Creation * Percona Toolkit UDFs * Support for Fake Changes * Kill Idle Transactions * XtraDB changed page tracking * Utility user * Extending the secure-file-priv server option * PAM Authentication Plugin * Log Archiving for XtraDB * User Statistics * Slow Query Log * Count InnoDB Deadlocks * Log All Client Commands (syslog) * Show Storage Engines * Show Lock Names * Process List * Misc. INFORMATION_SCHEMA Tables * Extended Show Engine InnoDB Status * Thread Based Profiling * XtraDB Performance Improvements for I/O-Bound Highly-Concurrent Workloads * Page cleaner thread tuning * Statement Timeout * Extended SELECT INTO OUTFILE/DUMPFILE * Per-query variable statement * Extended mysqlbinlog * Slow Query Log Rotation and Expiration * Audit Log * Backup Locks * CSV engine mode for a standard-compliant quote and comma parsing * Super read-only Percona XtraDB engine is distributed as part of the Percona Server for MySQL. IT includes all of InnoDB ‘s robust, reliable ACID-compliant design and advanced MVCC architecture, and builds on that solid foundation with more features, more tunability, more metrics, and more scalability. In particular, it is designed to scale better on many cores, use memory more efficiently, and be more convenient and useful. The new features are specially designed to alleviate some of InnoDB’s limitations. We choose features and fixes based on customer requests and on our best judgment of real-world needs as a high-performance consulting company.