In preparation for the book’s launch next month, I’ve created a website for it: High Performance MySQL. You may notice that the URL isn’t the same as the site for the first edition. It proved to be difficult to transfer that domain. If we accomplish it later on, I’ll set up a redirect.

Why an official site? To give you free stuff, of course. Final drafts of the front matter (TOC, preface, foreword), a sample chapter, and the index are there already. When the final quality control is done, I’ll update these. Right now they don’t have professionally drawn figures. That will change soon.

Also, you’ll eventually various things such as errata* and book-related info that I feel belongs there instead of here. You can subscribe to the site’s RSS feed to find out when these planned additions become reality.

* Surely there will be no errata, right? Right? …

I just got the rest of the production schedule from the publisher, plus the PDF files for quality control, for our upcoming book. (Now I have to proofreeed the whole book!) This is the first time I’ve seen the entire production schedule. The book is supposed to go to the printer in the first week of June. I don’t know what the on-the-shelf date will be, but I think very shortly after that. The publisher has promised that it’ll physically be on sale at Velocity.

I also took a peek at the PDFs. Without the appendixes, the last page of Chapter 14 (Tools for High Performance) is page 604. The appendixes bring it to 660 pages. That’s real material, …

I’m going to be at beCamp 2008, the followup to the first beCamp, which I sadly missed.

beCamp is a BarCamp un-conference. Tonight was about meeting, greeting, and throwing ideas at the wall to see which ones stick. Literally. We stuck pieces of paper on the wall with our ideas — things we can either talk about or want to hear about — and then scratched our votes on them to see which are popular.

I live and breathe MySQL for a decent part of the day, so I hesitated, but then stuck “MySQL Performance” on the wall. It got quite a few votes, so I assume will be giving a talk on MySQL performance basics at some point during the conference. (The exact schedule is probably being determined right now, in my absence, but I’m so tired right now that I’ll just take my chances on it not being at 8:00 AM tomorrow.) [edit: I just checked the website and there won’t be …

If you’re waiting for High Performance MySQL Second Edition to hit the shelf, you’re not the only one. I am too! I can’t wait to actually hold it in my hands.

But you don’t have to wait idly. No, not at all! You can pre-order it and then you’ll get it as soon as possible. Plus your pre-order will help them …

Keith Murphy and his hard-working crew have released the spring 2008 issue of MySQL Magazine. Go take a look — it includes quite a few articles on various topics, even a mention of our upcoming book (High Performance MySQL, Second Edition).

Keith Murphy, mysql, MySQL Magazine

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

There are quite a few business angles you might see only if you’re here at the conference, and you won’t get from blogs. For example, let’s take a look at the contents of the shoulder bags they hand out with your registration. (This is only a partial list.)

• SnapLogic’s flyer gets it right: their system is compatible with “GNU Linux.” Hooray, a commercial company acknowledging the GNU operating system for what it is!
• MySQL Enterprise’s flyer has three big bullet points: MySQL Load Balancer, MySQL Connection Manager, and MySQL Enterprise Monitor Query Analyzer. The first two look like they’re probably built on MySQL Proxy. The last has a visual explain plan feature, which according to an elevator conversation is not yet built. I’ll stop by their booth and see. As you may know, Maatkit has provided a tool (which is designed for integration into other tools) …

Just a quick note to say we have reached the production stage of the book project. Production is the process of transforming our OpenOffice.org files into the final page layout using a professional typesetting program.

As you can probably guess, this is later than we would have wished. This also means we won’t have the book for sale at the upcoming MySQL Conference and Expo. We will have a display copy at the O’Reilly booth at the conference, and you will be able to pre-order the book at a discount at that booth. (Several details remain to be worked out — do not trust the Amazon.com information on the book, as it is a weird blend of the first and second editions).

The book is very, very good. You will not be disappointed. I can’t think of a credible way to explain how good this book is — it’s just very, very good. Better than anything else you’ve …

I've decided to start replacing L with GL in acronyms where L supposedly stands for Linux.

I'm not a big user of acronyms, because I think they are exclusionist and they obscure, rather than revealing. (This wouldn't matter if I wrote for people who already knew what I meant and agreed with me, but that's a waste of time). However, LAMP is one that I've probably used a few times, without thinking that it is supposed to stand for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. In fact, it doesn't refer to Linux, it refers to GNU/Linux. Therefore, it should be GLAMP.

Why does this matter? I try not to say Linux, unless I'm referring to a kernel, because a kernel is not an operating system. I try to be pretty careful about saying GNU/Linux when I'm talking about an operating system. An exception is a recruiting event yesterday at the University of …

I dashed off a hasty post about speeding up replication slaves, and gave no references or explanation. That's what happens when I write quickly! This post explains what the heck I was talking about.