Understanding MySQL Internals

Understanding MySQL Internals. By Sasha Pachev, O’Reilly 2007. Page count: about 227 pages. (Here’s a link to the publisher’s site).

I should have read this book a long time ago, and it’s my loss that I didn’t. Although the title makes it sound like it should only benefit those who’ll be changing the MySQL server’s own code, that’s not true. To the contrary, at least parts of this book should be required reading for DBAs and developers who use MySQL, after they gain a moderate level of familiarity with how to use the server.

The book does indeed start off …

Oracle’s plans for Sun’s OSS. The UK’s updated OSS strategy. And more.

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Oracle’s plans for Sun’s OSS
# Oracle’s MySQL strategy slide.

# eWeek reported that database thought leaders are divided on Oracle MySQL.

# Savio Rodrigues and Computerworld on Oracle’s plans for MySQL, other open source assets.

# Zack Urlocker is leaving Oracle/Sun/MySQL.

My editor Andy Oram recently sent me an ACM article on BASE, a technique for improving scalability by being willing to give up some other properties of traditional transactional systems.

It’s a really good read. In many ways it is the same religion everyone who’s successfully scaled a system Really Really Big has advocated. But this is different: it’s a very clear article, with a great writing style that really cuts out the fat and teaches the principles without being specific to any environment or sounding egotistical.

He mentions a lot of current thinking in the field, including the CAP principle, which Robert Hodges of Continuent first turned me onto a couple months ago. …

As you probably know, I recently finished writing a book with a few co-authors. I kept notes along the way and wanted to describe the process for those who are thinking about writing a book, too.

Update: see the followup post for more of the story, including my editor’s responses.

I think it’s important to be objective; my purpose here is to help prospective authors get a feeling of what it’s like, and it’s not all good (but I’d encourage people to do it anyway). Hopefully I won’t come off as sounding peeved at anyone or like I’m trying to put people down. I’ll have a lot to say about what went right and wrong, and how it helped and hindered the process.

Please excuse the rambling nature of this post. I’d love to …

If you’re at the MySQL Conference and Expo, you can get a free sample chapter of the upcoming High Performance MySQL Second Edition. Just go to the exhibition area. As you go through the doors, take an immediate left and look for the sample chapter on O’Reilly’s table. It’s a rough draft and contains typos and my incredibly crude drawings instead of those that will go into the final book, but it should serve to give you an idea of the book’s depth and scope. Kudos to Andy Oram, our editor, who was able to get these done for us on very short notice.

Andy Oram, mysqluc2008

It's been a while since I said anything about the progress on the book. That doesn't mean we are not still working on it, though.

As Peter wrote a while ago, he is basically wearing the hat of a very advanced technical reviewer at this point. We've finished writing all the chapters from his detailed outlines. He has worked through about half the chapters, and I'm continuing to spend my evenings and weekends and holidays (yes, nearly all my free time -- just ask my wife!) writing some new material (an appendix on EXPLAIN, for example), finishing unfinished things marked with TODO in the text, and revising chapters after Peter reviews them. Vadim is working on benchmarks. For example, he just finished some benchmarks for something I profiled with SHOW STATUS. I thought that would be good …

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.