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High Performance MySQL

I recently picked up two O'Reilly books for $20 each: "High Performance MySQL" and "SQL Tuning". I am almost done with "High Performance MySQL". Overall I would say it’s a good book. Not suprising from the original publication date it is focused on MySQL 4.1 and therefore does not cover a lot of the advances made with MySQL 5. Especially replication comes to mind, but also little things like index usage for MIN() and MAX(). It does however contain a few notes here and there about changes/enhancements to expect with MySQL 5.

There are a few things I hope will be improved in the 2nd edition.

  • The books reads well, almost like a normal discussion. The authors give anecdotes to explain challenges and then show solutions. However sometimes I would have wished for fewer anecdotes and more examples. Like in the chapter 5 where EXPLAIN is covered. I would have wished for way more sample outputs and maybe a short note about what the given output would indicate.
  • Again the book reads like a nice discussion, but in order to make the book more useful rather than a book shelve spacer once you are done reading it once, it would have been a good idea to frequently give short check lists. These could contain very short names for complex concepts introduced in the book. This way you can always go back to the checklist and if you don remember a specific term used there you can read it up again.
  • It would be great if the 2nd edition would make it easily possible to get just the update. Maybe a separate annotated index for 1ed readers or a comment in the side column. One the topic of side columns I love it when books use the side columns to summarize important content. This also makes it much easier to find a given paragraph if you want to read up on a topic later on.

Anyways it’s a good read, though I personally had hoped to learn more. But hey maybe I am already more knowledgeable than I though? ;-)