New MySQL Book for the Library
The High Performance MySQL book, by Jeremy Zawodny and Derek Balling, finally arrived from Amazon. There’s very few tech books I can read from cover to cover but this is one of them. I’m three chapters into it and I have a decent list of things I want to try/change with our MySQL installation, at work.
Our installation at work is version 3.23 running on an HP UX system (first on the list is upgrading to 4.0). I wouldn’t call our implementation trivial. The alumni database has several tables with over a million records. I inheritated the implementation when I was hired a little over 8 months ago and I’ve been surprised at how fast everything runs. Esspecially since I know there wasn’t any real optimization work done when it was designed and implemented. Our alumni database is merely a copy of the actual one, which is running on an IBM AS/400 DB2 system. Today I was running a few queries comparing data in our tables with the tables on the DB2 system. Most of the queries executed on our system with a few on the DB2 system. Just out of curiosity I decided to reverse the queries, executing them against the DB2 system. The same page (set of queries) loaded about 3 to 4 times faster using our MySQL system. I’m sure the bandwidth limitations between our web server and the DB2 system had something to do with it, but I think it’s still safe to say MySQL outperformed.
Anyway, with all that said there’s a lot of things I’d like to do to increase our performance and reliability. Replication, load balancing, backup and a few other things. The type of things this book was written for. We have another HP UX machine sitting in the datacenter, unused. Perfect for experimenting. If you’re someone like me, who uses MySQL and knows enough to make things work but wants to take it to the next level, this is the book to read. Also, Jeremy has written some good articles on MySQL in Linux Magazine recently that are worth reading.