Your comments on the Advanced MySQL Features chapter were great. A lot of the questions I got (in the comments and via email) about chapter 6 are really addressed in chapter 5, "Query Performance Optimization," so I'm posting its outline too. I have the same questions: are there things you'd like to see us cover? Do you have any favorite techniques you'd like to see us include? Any other comments or questions?

Work continues apace on High Performance MySQL, Second Edition (the link leads to the chapter outline). I'm working now on Chapter 6, Advanced SQL Functionality, and thought I'd solicit input on it. Are there things you'd like to see us cover? Do you have any favorite techniques you'd like to see us include? Feel free to leave feedback in the comments. The chapter is already significantly done, with 26 pages written, but the ink's not on paper yet, so there's still time to correct omissions!

I wrote a couple weeks ago about my work on the Backup and Recovery chapter for High Performance MySQL, 2nd Edition. Thanks for your comments and suggestions, and thanks to those of you who helped me over email as well.

I've had several questions about what is included in the chapter, so I thought I'd post the outline as it stands now.

A while ago Peter Zaitsev wrote about his wishes for mysqldump. These included multi-threaded dumps and "safe" dumps that would wait for a server to restart if it crashed, then keep dumping other tables. I've had sketches of this done for a while, but during this week I fleshed it out while writing about backup and recovery for our upcoming book.

Progress on High Performance MySQL, Second Edition is coming along nicely. You have probably noticed the lack of epic multi-part articles on this blog lately -- that's because I'm spending most of my spare time on the book. At this point, we have significant work done on some of the hardest chapters, like Schema Optimization and Query Optimization. I've been deep in the guts of those hard optimization chapters for a while now, so I decided to venture into lighter territory: Backup and Recovery, which is one of the few chapters we planned to "revise and expand" from the first edition, rather than completely writing from scratch. I'd love to hear your thoughts and wishes -- click through to the full article for more details on the chapter and how it's shaping up.

I mentioned earlier that I'd blog about progress on the book as we go. It's not only progress on the book itself -- I want to write about the process of writing, because I think it's very interesting and relevant to software engineering. I'm finding a lot of the work in writing a book comes from some of the same things that make software hard: coordinating work, deciding what should go where, and so on.

We've begun writing the second edition of the now-classic High Performance MySQL. "We" means co-authors Arjen Lentz, Baron Schwartz, Vadim Tkachenko, and Peter Zaitzev. O'Reilly is still the publisher, and Andy Oram is still the editor. With a team like this, I think the second edition will be a book you don't want to miss. Though in theory we're revising the first edition, the truth is we're starting from scratch and re-writing the book, and significantly expanding it at the same time. A lot has changed since Jeremy and Derek wrote the first edition. Today's MySQL deployments push the limits further than many people thought possible a few years ago. We'll teach you how they do it.