Learning from MySQL experts

Living in a modern world is a joy, since a lot of information is free and available for the general public. I could spend a lot of time writing about free information, but I won't. In this post I will blog about how you can become better at MySQL for free - - and do this by learning from the true experts.

Why bother becoming a better DBA? In most (if not all web applications) the database is the bottleneck. It's not really Java, PHP, Python or Ruby - it's the database. So if you want to write scaleable applications then learn how to analyze and optimize your database.

Scaling the application layer is often fast since you can add advanced profiling tools to figure out where the time is spent. It's also very easy to scale by just adding boxes if your application is stateless. Scaling the database is often very hard and requires knowledge of a database's internals, complex partitioning and sharding schemes.

Learning from slides

Learning by reading slides is very effective, since they are concise, to the point and informative.

Last week MySQL experts shared their knowledge in these two conferences:

• MySQL Conference & Expo 2009
• Percona performance conference

You can check slides at following pages:

• slides form MySQL conf - lots of them
• slides from Percona's conference

Some slides I found interesting

I have looked at a lot of the slides and here are some of them that I found interesting.

How they do it:

• Mining for Insight Within Two Billion Visits
• MySQL and Search at Craigslist: How Craigslist are using Sphinx to provide near-realtime search to millions of users
• Efficient Pagination Using MySQL: Some engineers from Yahoo thoughts on how to optimize pagination

Indexing-fu:

• Mastering the Art of Indexing: How to become better at using indexes. Really a good read since mastering indexes is essential to becoming a better DBA.
• Covering Indexes: Retrieving Data Without Accessing It: Same as the talk above. Features some case studies

General optimizations:

• Optimizing MySQL Performance with ZFS: Focuses on ZFS performance with MySQL, and explores its suitability for deploying workloads based on MyISAM and InnoDB
• Using Q4M: A Message Queue Storage Engine for MySQL
• The Return of Gearman: Gearman provides a distributed application framework, does not do any real work itself
• High Performance from a Boring Architecture: A lot of great tips from Baron Schwartz on how to scale MySQL
• Introduction to Innodb Performance Tuning: Vital reading if you are using InnoDB

Hungry for more?

There are tons of other resources where you can learn a lot more. For example, check out presentations from MySQL UC 2008.

If you have a link to a great scaling presentation then link it up in the comments.