High Performance MySQL (Paperback)

~ (Author), Derek J. Balling (Author)
Key Phrases: query barrel, raw backup, show innodb status, Solving Kernel Bottlenecks, Widgets Inc, Field Type Null Key Default Extra (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

As users come to depend on MySQL, they find that they have to deal with issues of reliability, scalability, and performance--issues that are not well documented but are critical to a smoothly functioning site. This book is an insider's guide to these little understood topics. Author Jeremy Zawodny has managed large numbers of MySQL servers for mission-critical work at Yahoo!, maintained years of contacts with the MySQL AB team, and presents regularly at conferences. Jeremy and Derek have spent months experimenting, interviewing major users of MySQL, talking to MySQL AB, benchmarking, and writing some of their own tools in order to produce the information in this book. In High Performance MySQL you will learn about MySQL indexing and optimization in depth so you can make better use of these key features. You will learn practical replication, backup, and load-balancing strategies with information that goes beyond available tools to discuss their effects in real-life environments. And you'll learn the supporting techniques you need to carry out these tasks, including advanced configuration, benchmarking, and investigating logs.

About the Author

Zawodny is an engineer at Yahoo!

Balling has been a Perl programmer and Unix/Linux system administrator since 1996, having helped build two different ISPs frm the ground up in the midwestern United States. He presently works at a healthcare supply company in the New York metropolitan area, helping infiltrate the Open Source virus into their infrastructure.

Product Details

• Paperback: 265 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media (April 8, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596003064
• ISBN-13: 978-0596003067
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #272,231 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

61 of 63 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Well explained MySQL concepts, July 10, 2004

By	Ales Kavsek (Ljubljana, Slovenia) - See all my reviews

As an Oracle DBA, I was looking for a book that can help me better understand MySQL core concepts and differences compared to my primary working platform. I was looking for a book with the flavor of Oracle Concepts Manual. I partially read official MySQL reference manual but didn't find (get?) all the answers (nor I really enjoyed reading it - sorry AB doc. team!).
I think this book filled my knowledge gap on MySQL perfectly. Actually, this book could easily bear different title, such as "MySQL concepts guide" or something like that. You'll probably read the book in a couple of days, thanks to the author's clear writing style.
Let me give you an example. Some technical topics are difficult to explain in a few sentences, like the one on letter I (Isolation) from ACID rules for 'safe' transactions. Just compare the explanation on "phantom reads" from this book with the one you'll find in Oracle Concepts Manual (freely available on-line from OTN). Now, which one did you understand on the first pass? ;-)
Thanks to clear and short explanations, right from the beginning of the book, I learned some important technical facts about MySQL that I could easily put in perspective with my Oracle background. For example:
-"All InnoDB tables have primary keys"
-"InnoDB tables are similar to Oracle index-organized tables."
-"MySQL will only ever use one index per table per query!"
-"MySQL doesn't cache rows for MyISAM tables, only indexes...as opposed to InnoDB"
-"...counts are very fast on MyISAM tables and slow on InnoDB tables..."
Obviously the chapters that I liked the most in this book are the ones that covers core things very well:
"2. Storage Engines",
"4. Indexes",
"5. Query Performance" and
"10. Security".
All other chapters are fine but not essential for my current use of MySQL (like the excellent chapter on replication where it's obvious that Jeremy poses vast practical experience with replication from his workplace at Yahoo!).
The only complaint that I have is the one on "Storage Engines" chapter. In my opinion multi storage engine architecture is the most important advantage of MySQL over all other database vendors
products. I wish author's went a little deeper with the details (and thanks but no thanks, I don't want to read source code ;-), especially InnoDB engine is not covered enough (hmm...or maybe it's just me, after all :-).
Overall this book is highly recommended to all DBAs, the existing MySQL DBAs as well as to all others that work with other RDBMS and want a fast way to pick the most important technical nuances of MySQL.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Make MySQL efficient, June 6, 2004

By	Harold McFarland (Florida) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

While the authors go over the basics of MySQL briefly in the first couple of chapters this is not a book for the new MySQL administrator. It assumes a good deal of basic knowledge about MySQL. On the other hand, if you know the basics and need to get that extra knowledge to move your system from one that just works to one that truly performs then this book is for you. From the initial steps of benchmarking your system and tweaking the indexes the book moves on to improving your performance through optimizing queries and server performance tuning. This includes examining all aspects of your system from disk and file system selection to minor configuration changes that may make great changes in performance. Once the server is working at its optimum for your needs the book turns to how to scale your SQL system up to multiple servers and configure replication, load balancing, and high availability systems. The main text of the book ends with a section on backup, recovery, and security. If you need performance, reliability and security beyond the standard configuration and need to maximize throughput this is the book you will want to have at hand. "High Performance MySQL" is one of the best optimization and performance books available for the intermediate to advanced user of MySQL - very highly recommended.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good book overall, but may grow obsolete to MySQL5., January 14, 2006

By	Sean O'Donnell - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I mainly bought this book so that I could get some insight into 'advanced' Storage and Replication techniques w/ MySQL.

Jeremy provided some pretty detailed and easy to understand examples, with decently comprehensive descriptions which did help answer some of the questions I had.

I'd suggest this book to anyone who wants to understand the principles of Storage and Replication techniques in MySQL4. This book is definately a kick in the right direction, but does not take you too far, so I'd say this is for intermediate users.

MySQL5 has many new storage and replication features not mentioned in this book, some of which resolve a lot of the 'problematic' storage and replication issues that this book discusses, thus making SOME of the content irrelevent (or obsolete) to MySQL5. However, the overall principles remain the same, and can be applied to either version.

If you're using MySQL4, then this book is for you!

If you're using MySQL5, you may want to wait for a revised edition of this book.

I sure hope Jeremy is working on a revised version for MySQL5! *hint*hint* =)