Sebastopol, CA—When it comes to MySQL, performance and reliability matter more than they ever have. Why? "Dot-com bust or no, the tech world continues to explode faster and faster, and MySQL is central to a decent slice of that activity," says Baron Schwartz, coauthor of the new edition of High Performance MySQL (O'Reilly, US $49.99).
"MySQL is not a toy anymore, as it was once said to be. Now, real money—sometimes even lives—are riding on it," Schwartz continues. "People need to know how to make it rock-solid. And in large-scale applications with hundreds or even thousands of servers, any performance gain is good for everyone: it's good for the pocketbook, good for our energy usage, and good for the environment (not only in terms of energy usage—computers are highly toxic to manufacture). We need to come out of the mindset that it's OK to just throw hardware, power and cooling at computing problems, and get back to more of the punch-card mindset where everyone was concerned about doing things efficiently."
In writing the book, Schwartz was joined by a team of MySQL experts: Peter Zaitsev, Vadim Tkachenko, Jeremy Zawodny, Arjen Lentz, and Derek Balling. In their preface, the authors state that they were seeking to create the mythical "perfect MySQL book" that none of them had read but kept looking for.
Accordingly, they focused not just on the needs of the MySQL application developer but also on the rigorous demands of the MySQL administrator, who needs to keep the system up and running no matter what the programmers or users may throw at the server. And most of all, they wanted a book that would help readers improve their skills and build fast reliable systems with MySQL: a book that would answer questions like "How can I set up a cluster of MySQL servers capable of handling millions upon millions of queries and ensure that things keep running even if a couple of the servers die?"
"This isn't just an updating of the first edition," notes Schwartz. "It's a complete rewrite from the ground up."
The new edition of High Performance MySQL teaches advanced techniques in depth so readers can bring out MySQL's full power. They'll learn how to design schemas, indexes, queries and advanced MySQL features for maximum performance, and get detailed guidance for tuning the MySQL server, operating system, and hardware to their fullest potential. Readers will also learn practical, safe, high-performance methods of scaling applications with replication, load balancing, high availability, and failover.
This second edition is completely revised and greatly expanded, with deeper coverage in all areas. Major additions include:
The book also includes chapters on benchmarking, profiling, backups, security, and tools and techniques to help measure, monitor, and manage MySQL installations.
For a review copy or more information please email kathrynb@oreilly.com. Please include your delivery address and contact information.
Derek J. Balling has been a Perl programmer and UNIX/Linux system administrator since 1996 and presently works as a system administrator at Vassar College.
Arjen Lentz was employee #25 at MySQL AB, dealing with the MySQL Manual, global Community Relations, the MySQL Users Conference, teaching MySQL Training courses, and MySQL Support Engineering. Arjen founded Open Query (http://openquery.com.au), which develops and provides its own MySQL and other open source training and consulting services in the Asia Pacific region and beyond.
Baron Schwartz is a software engineer who lives in Charlottesville, Virginia and goes by the online handle of "Xaprb," which is his first name typed in QWERTY on a Dvorak keyboard. He blogs about software engineering at http://www.xaprb.com/blog/.
Vadim Tkachenko was a Performance Engineer in at MySQL AB. As an expert in multithreaded programming and synchronization, his primary tasks were benchmarks, profiling, and finding bottlenecks. He also worked on a number of features for performance monitoring and tuning, and getting MySQL to scale well on multiple CPUs.
Peter Zaitsev specializes in helping administrators fix issues with Web sites handling millions of visitors a day, dealing with terabytes of data using hundreds of servers.
Jeremy Zawodny moved to Silicon Valley in late 1999 so he could work for Yahoo!--just in time to witness the .com bubble bursting first-hand. He's been at Yahoo! ever since, helping to put MySQL and other Open Source technologies to use in fun, interesting, and often very big ways. Jeremy rambles almost daily about technology and life in general on his weblog: www.jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/
Additional Resources:
For more information about the book, including table of contents, index, author bios, and cover graphic, see the catalog page for
High Performance MySQL, Second Edition.
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