Installing Percona Server Over MySQL

Here are the commands I use and work quite well for me.
Assumes you use CentOS and MySQL 5.5 64-bit.

What are the steps?

1. Install the Yum repository
2. stop mysql
3. remove mysql server 5.5
4. install percona server 5.5 + percona toolkit, xtrabackup and php/python/perl connectors
5. start percona server

The actual commands

1. rpm -Uhv http://www.percona.com/downloads/percona-release/percona-release-0.0-1.x86_64.rpm
2. /etc/init.d/mysql stop
3. yum remove mysql-server mysql-client MySQL-shared-compat 
4. yum install  Percona-Server-server-55 Percona-Server-client-55 Percona-Server-shared-55 Percona-Server-shared-compat percona-toolkit xtrabackup perl-DBD-MySQL php-mysql MySQL-python 
5. /etc/init.d/mysql start

Assuming everything goes according to plan, this procedure should only take a few minutes.