High Performance MySQL: Optimization, Backups, and Replication

by Baron Schwartz, Peter Zaitsev, Vadim Tkachenko

How can you bring out MySQL’s full power? With High Performance MySQL, you’ll learn advanced techniques for everything from designing schemas, indexes, and queries to tuning your MySQL server, operating system, and hardware to their fullest potential. This guide also teaches you safe and practical ways to scale applications through replication, load balancing, high availability, and failover.

Updated to reflect recent advances in MySQL and InnoDB performance, features, and tools, this third edition not only offers specific examples of how MySQL works, it also teaches you why this system works as it does, with illustrative stories and case studies that demonstrate MySQL’s principles in action. With this book, you’ll learn how to think in MySQL.


Learn the effects of new features in MySQL 5.5, including stored procedures, partitioned databases, triggers, and views
Implement improvements in replication, high availability, and clustering
Achieve high performance when running MySQL in the cloud
Optimize advanced querying features, such as full-text searches
Take advantage of modern multi-core CPUs and solid-state disks
Explore backup and recovery strategies—including new tools for hot online backups

Genres: Programming, Technology, Computer Science, Technical, Reference, Nonfiction, Software

823 pages, Paperback

First published June 18, 2008

Reviews

[Gavin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Databasing is all of the following: a hard precondition of almost all modern social activities; the high-stakes application of some very deep intellectual tortures; unutterably boring. This book's a nice intro to higher-level considerations: Query tuning (i.e. ask the question better), indexing (i.e. ask if it's been asked before), server tuning (ask a better person), replication (ask several people), benchmarking (ask trick questions). Not exactly chatty, but as engaging as you could expect:

The chapter concludes with recommendations for the long term care and feeding of your column indexes.

And it's not as gruesomely platform-specific as the title implies.

changing hardware might, in the best case, give you a 10-fold increase in speed. But tuning queries can often give you 1000-fold performance increase. Seriously.

Not deep, though: they namedrop B-trees and the query optimiser, but do not explain them beyond noting that they are very good and you should trust them. I haven't yet seen a bad O'Reilly book.

[Dmytro Shteflyuk · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those you always keep closeby. A must-read for anybody who works with MySQL.

[Darwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read! Helped us(Jaxtr) to scale to 10 million users in 8 months.

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic book.

There's a ton of great content in here, whether you're a DBA or an app developer that wants to understand their MySQL infrastructure better.

Discussion is not always focused on MySQL and reminds you to view MySQL as a component in a larger high performance system. Topics (eg. performance profiling) teach lessons valuable beyond MySQL, but with specific techniques for MySQL>

I could see parallels between the systems described in the book and what I see running in production and walked away with a better understanding them.

Overviews and chapter summaries were great at providing a high-level of topics I didn't have time to read (i.e. aren't relevant to me right now) but if you dig in the details are detailed and easy to read.

[Sohaib Shaheen · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books ever written on optimizing MySQL engine for performance. Will highly recommend to all developers, who are not aware of how DB engines work and how small tweaks can make difference in magnitudes of performance. I was myself able to optimize database with over 14 million records to respond in mere seconds after just optimizing indexes and data structure.

Use it as a guide to continuously improve your knowledge and as checkpoint list to apply to all systems with significant data. Not suitable for one time read only.

[Alexander Baygeldin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an immense source of information. The authors put an enormous effort into condensing their knowledge about MySQL performance in a single book. However, in my opinion, the ratio of the book's value to its size is kind of upsetting. After finishing the book, I can't really say that the time I spent on it was worth it. But at least I know where to look for a piece of advice if I encounter an issue with MySQL performance.

[Paul Waring · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some excellent tips in here, particularly the sections on table types and indexes. More of a reference work that you'll dip into than something to read from cover to cover - e.g. I keep a printed copy of the explanation of EXPLAIN columns on my desk.

If you have the electronic version from O'Reilly, make sure you download the latest copy as there was a second release in 2015.

[Mark McGranaghan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The canonical resource on deploying and operating MySQL in production. Obviously based on the authors' extensive production experiences and work in the MySQL OSS and commercial support worlds. A little annoying that there are frequent branches in the book to account for different storage engines and MySQL distributions, but that's the nature of the beast.

[Pim · Rating 4 out of 5]

The standard book for everyone who wants to learn more about MySQL performance. The book is written by multiple authors and that shows in that different sections easier or harder to read but the overall level of information is very good. The book does require some basic knowledge about MySQL and relational databases in general.

[Artur Sabirov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Огромная книга с избыточной подачей материала для простого чтения. Можно прочесть главы по оптимизации запросов, индексам, движкам и тюнингу конфига. Остальное можно дочитывать по мере необходимости.

[Aurimas Mikalauskas · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE bible of MySQL

[Filip Tepper · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good introduction to more advanced MySQL topics for beginners, though with years of experience you probably you won't find anything surprising in this book.

[Ladislav Prskavec · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book about MySQL.

[Uri · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lot of important and helpful information + very good, readable style, especially for a book on such a technical issue. Excellent!

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of good information but a hard read