Today, the book I would like to recommend is Efficient MySQL Performance – Best Practices and Techniques, Daniel Nichter, O’Reilly, 2021.
I participated (just a bit) in the writing of this book as technical reviewer with Vadim and Fipar. I really enjoyed that role of carefully reading the early drafts of the chapters Daniel was writing.
Although Daniel says the book is not for the experts, I think even experts will enjoy it because several key InnoDB concepts are also covered. You can see that I refer to the book often in my A graph a day, keeps the doctor away ! series on monitoring and trending.
If you’re looking for information on transaction isolation and undo logs, fuzzy checkpointing, etc… you’ll find valuable information in the book.
The book is also enhanced with detailed illustrations that help in understanding complicated concepts (InnoDB page flushing, page 216, Source to Replica , page 235, MVCC and undo logs, page 277 are some examples).
Personally, I use this book as I used the 2nd and 3rd editions of High Performance MySQL.
From the beginning to the end of the book, Daniel focuses on the most important and measurable metric for all database consumers: query response time.
I had the chance to meet again Daniel at Percona Live and offered me a signed copy 😉
I also had the privilege of having my review published in the back of the book:
If you are looking for a book to improve your knowledge of MySQL or if you are a software engineer who needs to deal with MySQL, this is a good choice.
I also recommend reading Daniel’s blog which is a complement to the book.
Have a good read and enjoy MySQL!
