Zend Taps Percona to Provide Support and Maintenance for DBi

May 15, 2012 Alex Woodie

Zend Technologies last week announced that it has selected Percona to maintain and support DBi, the new version of the MySQL database developed for the IBM i platform. Percona is a well-respected provider of MySQL support services that competes directly with MySQL.

Zend developed DBi to be a drop-in replacement for MySQL on the IBM i platform. The creation of a MySQL variant was necessary because Oracle dropped IBM i support on MySQL in late 2010. DBi was first revealed by Zend in September 2011 and shipped last month.

It was initially expected that Zend developers would continue to support and maintain DBi, which Zend said would eventually branch off from MySQL and become its own variant, while still remaining compatible with MySQL. The development effort that went into the first release of DBi was not major because DBi doesn’t diverge from the last release of MySQL that supported IBM i. However, as new releases of MySQL are released, more work will require more work to get it to run on IBM i.

This MySQL-for-IBM i work will now be done by Percona, a well-respected Pleasanton, California-based company that specializes in MySQL. Percona is one of the main providers of an alternative, supported version of MySQL. And now it will basically own the IBM i version of MySQL, DBi.

“Percona offered us the most efficient, rapid path to providing IBM i users with an excellent long-term solution to the MySQL dilemma, as well as a seamless transition to our new Zend DBi alternative,” Zend product director Kent Mitchell says in a press release. “This is very important to us because we know Percona will assist us to provide our customers with a well-supported, high performance MySQL-based solution both now and into the future.”

Vadim Tkachenko, Percona co-founder and CTO, said he was glad for the partnership. “Zend approached us to say that they want to ensure there’s a way forward for IBM i users and asked if we’d help them. We’re delighted to do so. The result is Zend DBi,” he stated in a press release.