The title of this book is very appropriate. Great coverage on performance, reliability, backup & recovery. Definitely not an introductory book.

There were a couple of places where the writing was hard to follow, but I'm sure that'll be fixed in the next printing.

This book has to have any MySQL DBA (both administrators and architects). It provides very deep view on how MySQL works and reacts on your configuration and SQL.

If you are programmer, you should browse this book too, to get background about MySQL and what it can do for you and what you can do for MySQL to get best performance SQL.

This probably should not be your first book about MySQL (not only knowledge but some experience is handy) but definitely second one ;)

I work with MySQL in a web server environment every day and performance
is always an issue. This book is simply excellent. The authors are quite knowledgeable -- they not only tell you what settings to you, but also include why. They debunked a lot of misconceptions I held about getting the best performance out of the server and when to use MyISAM v. InnoDB.

I especially appreciated the deep background into server operation and how data is stored and queries processed with the different storage engines. If you are thinking of using MySQL on a large project, you need this book.

There's a good reason this is a 2nd edition -- a great book.

Very nice book but unfortunately this book is not for beginners so if you're new in databases try to read some tutorials or books for beginners and then come back for this book.

As a MySQL expert with 9 years in MySQL performance and scalability, this book is definitely even in my library with my company 42SQL -- www.42sql.com

The 2nd edition is a complete rework with multiple new authors, with entire new content and significantly more volume then the 1st edition.

Containing a cross section from sound basic design tips such as choosing the optimal data types, and indexing strategies to the in-depth details of OS specifics such as the Raid chunk size for disk subsystems and LVM snapshot management this book has plenty of detail.

Being an independent publication not from the supplier, you are sure to also know where the strengths and weaknesses exist with the product. Comments like "MySQL replication has a number of shortcomings that MySQL AB plans to address in the future" pg. 407 highlights that MySQL is not perfect, and it's important to know any present limitations and how to address them.

I've yet to find the time to sit down and read this book from cover to cover, however for somebody relatively new to MySQL, this is a great book to read after you know the basic syntax of MySQL. A lot may not make sense the first time, but re-read it again in 6-12 months after you continue to use and understand MySQL.

The book is already exceeding expectations with news of a second printing with small corrections and translations already commencing in several languages.

High Performance MySQL opens with a quick chapter describing various MySQL installation options including binary packages and compiling from source code. The next chapter describes the different storage engines available in MySQL and why you would want to choose one over another. This is the book's first hint of what you can do to improve database performance: picking the right table type.

Skilled software developers use benchmarking to gain insight into how their software is performing and database benchmarking should be part of that strategy. A brief chapter introduces some database benchmarking strategies and tools.

Chapters on indexing and query performance follow, describing some of the most important skills to master. Following that, replication and load balancing are discussed. Backup and recovery options are covered, as is the topic of security.

A somewhat thin trio of goodies rounds off the book in the appendices: the SHOW STATUS / SHOW INNODB STATUS commands, the mytop tool, and the phpMyAdmin user interface.

Overall, I found many possible areas for performance improvement that I had not thought of before. At 278 pages, a lot of material is crammed into this book. It's a quick read and if you're a MySQL admin or a developer using MySQL, you're bound to find something useful here!