High Performance MySQL
by Jeremy D. Zawodny, Derek J. Balling, Baron Schwartz, Peter Zaitsev, Baron Schwartz. Peter Zaitsev. Vadim Tkachenko. Jeremy D. Zawodny. Arjen Lentz. Derek J. Balling · first published 2004
68% recommend30% neutral3% critical
Why HN recommends it
Practical guide to MySQL performance tuning, query optimization, replication, high availability and backups, with insights hard to piece together from online docs. Suits developers and admins scaling MySQL.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Second Edition
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My favorite advanced MySQL book is the O'Reilly one by Jeremy Zawodny (formerly the chief MySQL dude at Yahoo, now of Craigslist): http://www.amazon.com/High-Performance-MySQL-Jeremy-Zawodny/... You can learn the basics of MySQL online or through just about any book, but once you've gotten beyond that and want to learn more, this book is loads better than all the others.
on “Ask YC: Can you recommend me a good MySQL optimization book?” ↗4. performance issues "High Performance MySQL" ByJeremy D. Zawodny, Derek J. Balling — It's been very helpful to me http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596003067 http://www.amazon.com/High-Performance-MySQL-Jeremy-Zawodny/...
on “Whats the best resource you refer to learn database design, mysql conepts” ↗…the Postgres versions of that (to my regret), but for the MySQL version you can read something like this: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/replication.html Better yet, find yourself a copy of High Performance MySQL.
on “Heroku's AWS outage post-mortem” ↗…applied to another OS (or on one game engine and applied to another, et al). Here's a few books I think are worth reading, not in any particular order of prevalence, but loosely categorized Databases: High Performance MySQL: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1449314287/ SQL Queries for Mere Mortals: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321992474/ The Art of SQL: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596008945/ Networking:…
on “My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day” ↗…Big Red Fez. Most of those have fairly obvious stuff. 2. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell 3. Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore Technical 1. Building Scalable Websites by Cal Henderson 2. High Performance MySQL by Jeremy Zawodny 3. Pragmatic Programmer by...well, it's mentioned elsewhere here. There are lots of other technical books I like, but most of them aren't directly relevant to the startup I'm building
on “Startup founders, what books did you find most helpful?” ↗The 2nd edition of High Performance MySQL might interest you: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0596101716 It covers, among tons of other stuff, some new features in MySQL 5.1 that make partitioning easier.
on “Ask HN: "Simple" sharding tutorials using MySQL or PostgreSQL?” ↗What do you think of Zawodny and Balling's High Performance MySQL? I thought it did a really good job on optimizations for not just MySQL, but many things in common to various SQL systems.
on “What is the single most influential book every programmer should read?” ↗The two must have books for MySQL admin and discuss MySQL's built in replication, what problems you'll encounter, how to tune etc. - High Performance MySQL (Schwartz et al) - MySQL High Availability (Bell et al) I think using MySQL::Replication can be applied on top of what's in these books, but not using their particular setups.
on “MySQL::Replication - peer-to-peer based, multi-master replication for MySQL” ↗…being an expert is that one knows the names of some real experts, who are better than you. In this case, some real experts in MySQL backup work at Percona. Hire them. Alternatively, buy the O'Reilly book High Performance MySQL, which is partly the work of Percona's founders and has chapters about backups. (If you are the foremost expert in a field, of course, you probably don't feel like an expert either, because you're at…
on “Why Your Customers Would Be Happier If You Charged More” ↗Sure - here's a list of what's good to know for MySQL. Other DBs are going to have different needs, though the indexing data is good to know regardless. Start with the book High Performance MySQL. [1] Follow up with the whitepaper "Causes of Downtime". [2] Then find a copy of the IMDB dataset, put that in a database, and write an app against it. Make that app perform well, then simulate load…
on “The Database Administrator is dead” ↗Kind of depends on the db and engine being used, but for MySQL, this book has been very good in helping me optimize sensitive queries: High Performance MySQL by Jeremy D. Zawodny
on “Ask HN: What is the best online resource to learn advanced SQL?” ↗…perf gain you can get just by twiddling the parameters of the database, i.e. all the tricks you can do when the single instances are bottle necks. There's a similar book for MySQL https://www.amazon.com/High-Performance-MySQL-Optimization-R... # PostgreSQL 9 High Availability Cookbook https://www.amazon.com/PostgreSQL-9-High-Availability-Cookbo... Discusses how do you go from 1 Postgres instance to 1+ instance. Talks about…
on “Ask HN: What is the best online resource to learn advanced SQL?” ↗InnoDB does indeed use a B+ tree. A more thorough article on the topic is http://blog.jcole.us/2013/01/10/btree-index-structures-in-in... or the book High Performance MySQL.
on “MySQL (InnoDB) clustered and non-clustered indexes” ↗…O'Reilly books about it from the development, optimization and administration perspectives. Just from O’Reilly there is: Learning SQL [focused on MySQL], Learning MySQL [not to be confused with the former], High Performance MySQL, Efficient MySQL Performance, MySQL Cookbook. And all of them are up to date. The official docs are also very good. On the PostgreSQL side, no such resources, there seems to be no recent good books about…
on “Ask HN: Is MySQL 8, in 2022, a safe DB for storing financial data?” ↗…it, but they don't give a compelling reason to choose MySQL over e.g. PostgreSQL. One thing I like about MySQL is the support available from third parties like Percona - I'll also recommend the book "High Performance MySQL", which gives some great details on performance tuning and query optimizing. I'm not familiar with the offers for PostgreSQL - I'd like to hear what support services and books people with PostgreSQL…
on “Why Should You Use MySQL?” ↗