I recently picked up two O'Reilly books for $20 each: "High Performance MySQL" and "SQL Tuning". I am almost done with "High Performance MySQL". Overall I would say it’s a good book. Not suprising from the original publication date it is focused on MySQL 4.1 and therefore does not cover a lot of the advances made with MySQL 5. Especially replication comes to mind, but also little things like index usage for MIN() and MAX(). It does however contain a few notes here and there about changes/enhancements to expect with MySQL 5.
There are a few things I hope will be improved in the 2nd edition.
- The books reads well, almost like a normal discussion. The authors give anecdotes to explain challenges and then show solutions. However sometimes I would have wished for fewer anecdotes and more examples. Like in the chapter 5 where EXPLAIN is covered. I would have wished for way more sample outputs and maybe a short note about what the …