Percona Toolkit 3.7.1 has been released on Dec 17, 2025. The most important updates in this version are:

• Finalized SSL/TLS support for MySQL
• Added support for Debian 13 and Amazon Linux 2023
• Fixed MariaDB support broken in version 3.7.0
• Added options to skip certain collections in pt-k8s-debug-collector and pt-stalk
• Documentation improvements
• Other performance improvements

In this blog, I will outline the most significant changes. A full list of improvements and bug fixes can be found in the release notes.

SSL/TLS support for MySQL

Percona Toolkit historically did not have consistent SSL support. This was reported at https://perconadev.atlassian.net/browse/PT-191. In version 3.7.0, option s for DSN was introduced. This option instructs DBD::mysql to open a secure connection with the database. This version also adds command-line option --mysql-ssl and its short form -s to all tools. All other SSL/TLS-related options, such as ssl-ca, ssl-cert, ssl-cipher, etc, could be specified in the configuration file if necessary. This completes SSL/TLS support for MySQL. For more details and information check this blog post.

Supported Platforms Update

Percona repositories now have Percona Toolkit packages for Debian 13 and Amazon Linux 2023. To install them enable repository pt with the percona-release utility. Ubuntu Focal reached its EOL and support for this platform has been removed. More information on Percona repositories is available in the User Reference Manual.

Regression Bug Fixes

Recent major changes introducing MySQL 8.4 support missed ignore case modificator for the regular expression that checks if MySQL flavor is MariaDB. As a result, tools executed replication statements not compatible with MariaDB. Version 3.7.1 fixes the regular expression and re-adds MariaDB support back (PT-2451). Future versions of Percona Toolkit will have better MariaDB support, including MariaDB-specific versions of non-offensive replication commands.

Utility pt-sift stopped working, because dependent library alt_cmds.sh was not included (PT-2498). This was not found during previous release testing, because regression test for the tool was not run. Now this miss is fixed and the utility works properly again. Additionally, regression test is updated.

Helper utility version_cmp was written in some compiled language and source code for it was not available (PT-2469). This broke version checking on platforms not compatible with the unknown platform where the binary was originally compiled. Now this utility rewritten as a Bourne-Again shell script.

Modern MySQL Support

Percona Toolkit uses legacy MySQL syntax in many places to be compatible with older versions of MySQL. In other places, it misses modern MySQL diagnostic additions. This version makes first steps to improve this situation by adding such features as invisible index support in pt-duplicate-key-checker (PR-996) and performance_schema.threads collecton in pt-stalk (PT-1718). Currently, data from performance_schema.threads is collected along with the deprecated information_schema.processlist. In the future, support for information_schema.processlist will be deprecated, then removed.

Future versions of Percona Toolkit will have more modern MySQL diagnostic support.

Performance Improvements

pt-stalk now has new option, --skip-collection, that allows to skip one or more collections. Supported values for this option are: ps-locks-transactions, thread-variables, innodbstatus, lock-waits, mysqladmin, processlist, rocksdbstatus, transactions. To skip two or more collections, separate them with a comma. E.g., --skip-collection=processlist,innodbstatus. You will find more information at PT-2289 and in the User Reference Manual for pt-stalk.

pt-k8s-debug-collector introduces option -skip-pod-summary allowing to skip pod summary collections, such as pt-mysql-summary, pt-mongodb-summary, or pg_gather. Check PT-2453 and the User Reference Manual for pt-k8s-debug-collector.

Originally, tools output was always buffered. This is usually good for performance but you may want to disable this feature when need to see output of the tools faster. For example, if you run pt-archiver or pt-table-checksum on large table in Kubernetes, you won’t see progress (PT-2052) until the tool finishes. New option, --[no]buffer-stdout, allows to disable buffering when needed.

Incompatilbe change

Earlier, if --chunk-size was enabled for pt-online-schema-change, option --chunk-time was ignored. This caused situations when a user has to start with default automatic chunk size even if it was not effective for some tables, and wait when chunk size is adjusted in subsequent iterations. Alternatively, they had to guess fixed chunk size that implies time consuming try and error approach (PT-1423).

Starting from version 3.7.1, if both options --chunk-size and --chunk-time are specified, initial chunk size will be as specified by the option --chunk-size, but later it will be adjusted, so that the next query takes specified amount of time (in seconds) to execute.

Documentation Improvements

While working on this release we found undocumented featues such as --recursion-method=dsn support in pt-table-sync (PT-2470), broken man page for pt-secure-collect and other tools written in Go language (PT-1564), as well as minor documentation issues. Now all of them are fixed.

Community contributions

This release includes contributions from Community and Percona Engineers who do not actively work on the project. We want to thank:

• Iwo Panowicz for option -skip-pod-summary in pt-k8s-debug-collector (PT-2453)
• Matthew Boehm for invisible indexes support in pt-duplicate-key-checker (PR-996)
• Nilnandan Joshi for collecting performance_schema.threads along with information_schema.processlist in pt-stalk (PT-1718) and fix for PT-2014 - pt-config-diff does not honor case insensitivity flag
• Paweł Kudzia for the updated documentation of pt-query-digest (PR-953)
• Maciej Dobrzanski for fixing PR-890 - pt-config-diff: MySQL truncates run-time variable values longer than 1024 characters
• Marek Knappe for fixing PT-2418 - pt-online-schema-change 3.7.0 lost data when exe alter xxx rename column xxx and PT-2458 - remove-data-dir defaults to True
• Yoann La Cancellera for his work on pt-galera-log-explainer
• Nyele for restoring MariaDB support (PT-2465)
• Taehyung Lim for fixing PT-2401 - pt-online-schema-change ’table does not exist’ on macos
• Viktoras Agejevas for fixing PR-989 - Fix script crashing with precedence error in pt-online-schema-change
• Hartley McGuire for fixing PT-2015 - pt-config-diff does not sort variable flags