High performance mySQL
All the advanced topics relating to mySQL that other books leave out can all be found in this one book.
My Rating: 
Pros
- Covers benchmarking and profiling - to help you find the bottlenecks
- Looks at both software and hardware optimisation
- Discussion of approaches to replication and scaling for large databases
- Deals with backups and security
- Covers database normalisation including when not to normalise.
Cons
- Not for beginners
- Some of the topics covered may never be needed if you only ever have small databases containing a few million records
Description
- Second Edition: June 2008
- 684 page paperback
- Published by O'Reilly Medias
- ISBN 978-0-596-10171-8
- Authors Baron Schwartz, Peter Zaitzev, Vadim Tkachenko, Jeremy D Zawodny, Arjen Lentz and Derek J Balling
Review
This book isn't going to teach you how to code the SQL statements to access the data in your mySQL database. There are plenty of other books that cover the basics of creating and using databases. Instead this book covers all the aspects of using mySQL that the other books leave out whick makes it a perfect companion to whichever other mySQL books you may have.
All the serious top end aspects of using mySQL databases are covered in the book including the essential ones such as backups and security, through the extremely useful ones such as benchmarking and profiling through to those that are only needed for databases that will be used by a huge number of people all at the same time such as database replication.
mySQL databases support a number of different ways in which the tables can be stored and this book covers the differences between how these work and helps you to choose which of them is the more appropriate for your given circumstances.
