Customer Reviews

MySQL High Availability: Tools for Building Robust Data Centers

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I'm not a DBA, just a lowly web applications developer who happens to use MySQL as a backend most of the time. I've been developing with a lot of nagging questions in my brain: "How do you set up a master-slave replication?" "How do you roll back the database to a past point in time?" (The kinds of nagging questions that, as a Django or Rails developer, tend to be "someone else's problem.")

This is a brilliant and powerful book. I picked this up in the bookstore and couldn't stop reading it. It's not the only resource available on MySQL replication, monitoring, and clustering, and another title, High Performance MySQL: Optimization, Backups, Replication, and More, has a few chapters that overlap with the topics in this book.

That being said, I liked the tone and pace of this book, and it goes more in-depth than many other similar titles that cover the same material. It made concepts stick to my brain like no other MySQL book I've read so far. The authors make the material very accessible, even though it's not easy subject matter. For me, it shed a lot of light on some mysterious MySQL topics.

It's not a beginner's book, but if you've been working comfortably with a MySQL shell at a startup for a while, are interested in digging deeper, and you're looking for an excuse to buy another computer book, this one is definitely worth it.

Well,
I am not a MySQL professional, so my comments bellow shall be taken as a suggestion from a Sr Software Developer, not from a DBA. I used to work many years with Oracle but my experience in MySQL is definitely not as good as in Oracle.

I think that readers of this book shall have a good background in general RDBMS systems, already understand the principles of high availability, being at least medium skilled on how to administer MySQL and eventually they have already deal with issues like monitoring or backup/recovery.

The book is excellent structured and easy to read if you understand the concepts. If you are already skilled with Oracle some of the stuff here will look ancient and so primitive, but keep in mind that is not always easy to sponsor a project that is going to use Oracle.

My favorite chapters are the one about HA environments, a good intro (the first I ever see) about techniques for using MySQL in a cloud environment like Amazon's AWS.

Another argument to convince you to read this book: is full of examples. many books talks about these concepts without giving examples. You will find here sql scripts, PHP code, Python code, screen captures, very practical examples for how to start and stop slave threads, running replication over a PKI infrastructure, monitor the storage engine and many others.

If all these are not enough (believe me, it's a big comprehensive reference, it was not my case to fully use it anyway), so if all these are not enough you will find an appendix really useful: tips and tricks for running and diagnosing (yes, diagnosing) MySQl replication. Here are some tips: what to do when slave stopped, only replicate some rows to slave or how to allow a slave to periodically challenge the master.