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.

• 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.

And three, we just keep getting compliment after compliment.  They usually look something like this:

I bought the 2nd edition right around the time I initially contacted you guys.  Congratulations on the book; its a well-written, lucid description of what’s going on, and how to affect it.

That’s a random but real quote.  It’s also a great feeling.

There are different places that we can make changes to improve performance of a MySQL application: schema optimization and indexing, query performance optimization, tuning database server settings. The more detail and deep information on MySQL performance was covered in the guide book of High Performance MySQL, 2nd edition written by the MySQL performance experts. In this document, I have research test results bellow showing that increasing MySQL performance with these methods can actually reduce CPU utilization to save energy.

I couldn’t have said it better.  You should really read the post — it is a great investigation into how increased performance brings cost savings.  (Not only that, it helps conserve natural resources).

In general one of the reasons I felt so strongly about the need for this book, and spent so much time on it, is that it’s really possible to get order-of-magnitude performance gains from MySQL.  That means proportionally fewer servers, less power, less air conditioning, fewer toxic computers manufactured.  And I mean the gains can be dramatic.  One of my current consulting clients is doing exactly what my previous employer did — but less of it — and is using upwards of 80 servers for the task.  In my opinion they only need 4 or 6 servers to handle their load.  Opportunities for this type of performance improvement are all around me on a daily basis.