High Performance MySQL

The third edition is now available for preorder from Amazon.com, and we’ve posted a sample chapter for you to preview.

The third edition of High Performance MySQL will be available in a matter of months. What’s new in this edition?

The third edition has a different focus than the second edition. The second edition presented a lot of information to readers, but no book can provide complete coverage of a topic. Between the second and third editions, we took notes on literally thousands of interesting problems we’ve solved or seen others solve. When we started to outline the third edition, it became clear that not only would full coverage of these topics require three to five thousand pages, but the book still wouldn’t be complete. After reflecting on this problem, we realized that the second edition’s emphasis on deep coverage was actually self-limiting, in the sense that it often didn’t teach readers how to think about MySQL.

As a result, this third edition has a different focus than the second edition. We still convey a lot of information, and we still emphasize the same goals, such as reliability and correctness. But we’ve also tried to imbue the book with a deeper purpose: we want to teach the principles of why MySQL works as it does, not just the facts about how it works. We’ve included illustrative stories and case studies, which demonstrate the principles in action. We build on these to try to answer questions such as, “given MySQL’s internal architecture and operation, what practical effects arise in real usage? Why do those effects matter? How do they make MySQL well suited (or not well suited) for particular needs?”

Ultimately, we hope that your knowledge of MySQL’s internals will help you in situations beyond the scope of the book. And we hope that your newfound insight will help you to learn and practice a methodical approach to designing, maintaining, and troubleshooting systems that are built on MySQL.

If you like reading books online, Scribd is another way you can do it! You can actually read a lot of our book through the preview, without even needing to buy it. Here’s a link.

My fellow authors and I are at the MySQL Conference and Expo 2009, and within minutes of opening the door to the expo hall, the O’Reilly booth sold completely out of our book. What fun!

High Performance MySQL, Second Edition has won top place in the Jolt Awards Productivity Winners in the Technical Books category.

O’Reilly tells me that translation rights for the book have been purchased in the following languages:

• Korean
• Russian
• Portuguese
• Polish
• Spanish
• Czech

These are agreements with other publishers to essentially reprint it in other languages, as I understand it. In addition to these, of course there is English, and O’Reilly’s German division is supposed to translate it (may have already?) too.

The book has been selling very well–remaining in Amazon’s top 2000 titles–and the first printing has apparently sold out much more quickly than expected.  If they had known how soon a second printing would be necessary, they would have printed more.  In any case, O’Reilly has worked with us to go well above and beyond the norm for a second printing: not only have we fixed errata, we even went as far as rearranging page breaks and moving figures to improve readability. The second printing is on Monday August 4th.

To clarify, this is a second printing of the second edition, not an entirely new edition.  As each print run sells out there will be more printings to meet demand.

The book is also going to be translated into Spanish, Polish, and Portuguese.  Further translations may be announced in the future.

The book just keeps selling.  We’ve all but sold out of the first printing, in much less time than expected, and we’ve been hovering around sales rank 1000 on Amazon.com for a long time.  This continues to amaze me.  A second printing is imminent — just as soon as the errata are corrected!

A pretty frequent comment I get is “I’m thinking about buying the second edition. What’s the difference from the first edition?” I’ll try to answer that question here.

• A lot more content.  684 pages instead of 230, plus it’s compactly written.  You can count on about 3 or 4 times as much real information.
• Much deeper insight into server internals.  If you found the first edition’s coverage of indexing, schema optimization and query optimization a bit superficial, you will not be disappointed by the second edition.  It probably tells you more than you want to know, really.
• InnoDB, InnoDB, InnoDB.  InnoDB is the leading storage engine for MySQL, and for good reason: it’s fast, stable, robust and has lots of advanced features.  We cover it like nothing you’ve ever read before.  If you’re having trouble with InnoDB tuning or if it’s giving you problems under extreme load, this book is for you.
• A changed focus.  We wrote the book for people who have “real money” in their servers and need to rely on MySQL.  Default installations of MySQL are fine for lightweight forums or something, but we’ve built some of the largest and most heavily trafficked sites in the world on MySQL.  The second edition shows you how to build a MySQL installation that you can really count on.
• A lot of details on operating system and hardware tuning, plus how to choose hardware for your server.
• Much more information on replication. You can get setup guides from anywhere.  What you can’t get from anywhere is how to make replication rock-solid.
• Real insight into how you can scale your systems big.  We give specific advice, not generic “oh, you might consider this and that.” We’ve been through a lot of projects building MySQL out to really really big sizes, and we’ve seen dozens of different ways to do it.  If you ever think your systems won’t fit on a single server, buy the book and save a ton of time and money.  Scaling big is no simple matter.
• Much more useful advice on benchmarking and profiling.
• Tons of “hacks” that get around MySQL’s weaknesses, with advice on when to use them.
• A thorough guide to tuning MySQL.  Again this is an area where the first edition was not very comprehensive.  Special attention is given to InnoDB and MyISAM tuning.
• Deep dives into advanced topics: the query cache, views, character sets, partitioning, and so on.  Most of these were not mentioned in the first edition, and certainly not in any depth.
• Advice on how to optimize your applications.  Three of the authors are full-stack performance consulting experts — we know a lot more than just MySQL.
• Backup advice that actually works.  Backing up MySQL is non-trivial, especially in mixed environments (common these days).  If you do it the first edition’s way, you are likely to be doing it wrong.  The first edition’s advice was pretty much good only for MyISAM tables.
• The best information anywhere on SHOW INNODB STATUS and many other advanced topics.
• Four appendixes about essential topics.

You can download the sample table of contents from the Download tab above to browse the topic list in more detail.

Looking for a sample of what the book is like? Here are two ways you can try before you buy:

• Read the sample chapter, table of contents, and index on the Downloads page.
• Go to the O’Reilly page for the book, and browse the table of contents. The chapters and first-level headings are shown, and you can click on each and get about a 1-2 page preview. So this is a great way to preview about 10-15 pages per chapter.