High Performance MySQL

Jeremy Zawodny and his two cats moved from Northwest Ohio 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!(R) ever since, helping to put MySQL and other Open Source technologies to use in fun, interesting, and often very big ways. Starting with the popular and high-traffic Yahoo! Finance site, he worked to make MySQL part of the site's core infrastructure in large batch operations as well as real-time feed processing and serving content directly on the site. He then helped to spread "the MySQL religion" to numerous other groups within Yahoo!, including News, Personals, Sports, and Shopping. Nowadays he acts as Yahoo!'s MySQL guru, working with Yahoo!'s many engineering groups to get the most out of their MySQL deployments. In 2000, he began writing for Linux Magazine and continues to do so today as a columnist and contributing editor. After over a year of active participation on the MySQL mailing list, he got the idea to write a book about MySQL. (How hard could it be, really?) You can still find him answering questions on the list today. Since 2001, Jeremy has been speaking about MySQL at various conferences (O'Reilly's Open Source Conference, PHPCon, The MySQL User Conference, etc.) and user groups in locations as far away as Bangalore, India. His favorite topics are performance tuning, replication, clustering, and backup/recovery. In more recent times, he's rediscovered his love of aviation, earning a Private Pilot Glider license in early 2003. Since then he's spent far too much of his free time flying gliders out of Hollister, California and Truckee, near Lake Tahoe. He hopes to soon earn his Commercial Pilot license and then go on to become a certified flight instructor someday. Occasional MySQL consulting also helps to pay for his flying addiction. Derek J. Balling has been a Perl programmer and UNIX/Linux system administrator since 1996, having helped build two different ISPs from the ground up in the midwestern United States. He spent several years of his career at Yahoo!, working in their Infrastructure Group, where he worked on tools to help improve system uptime. He presently works at a healthcare supply company in the New York metro area, helping infiltrate the Open Source virus into their infrastructure. He has also written articles for The Perl Journal and a number of online magazines. When not working on computer-related issues, Derek relaxes with his two cats in his lakeside residence, and has recently taken up the sport of fencing.

Preface; 1. Back To Basics Binary Versus Compiled-From-Source Installations Configuration Files The SHOW Commands; 2. Storage Engines (Table Types) MySQL Architecture Locking and Concurrency Transactions Selecting the Right Engine The Storage Engines; 3. Benchmarking The Importance of Benchmarking Benchmarking Strategies Benchmarking Tools; 4. Indexes Indexing Basics Index Structures Indexes and Table Types Index Maintenance; 5. Query Performance Query Processing Basics Optimizer Features and Oddities Identifying Slow Queries Influencing MySQL with Hints Stupid Query Tricks; 6. Server Performance Tuning Performance-Limiting Factors RAID Operating System Techniques; 7. Replication Replication Overview Configuring Replication Under the Hood Replication Architectures Administration and Maintenance Common Problems The Future of Replication; 8. Load Balancing and High Availability Load Balancing Basics Configuration Issues Cluster Partitioning High Availability; 9. Backup and Recovery Why Backups? Considerations and Tradeoffs Tools and Techniques Rolling Your Own Backup Script; 10. Security Account Basics The Grant Tables Grant and Revoke Operating System Security Network Security Data Encryption MySQL in a chrooted Environment A. The SHOW STATUS and SHOW INNODB STATUS Commands B. mytop C. phpMyAdmin Index