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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.

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 enough to assert something about the performance. Sure enough, SHOW STATUS says it does less work, but Vadim’s benchmarks show it’s slower :-) This is why we check each other’s work!

The core chapters on MySQL performance — beginning with Benchmarking and Profiling, and continuing through Optimizing Server Settings — are the ones Andy Oram, our editor, thinks we should put the most effort into, and I agree. We will probably circle back and go through another review/edit cycle before we release them for technical review. Some of the other chapters, such as Replication, are already out for technical review.

Despite the fact that all of the chapters and appendixes are theoretically a “first draft,” as of several weeks ago, there is still a lot of work to do. Depending on the chapter, it takes me a solid weekend to revise a chapter after Peter reviews it. Each little thing anyone points out (does MySQL version X really do Y by default?) requires some research, testing, benchmarks, or even reading the source code.

Some miscellanea:

• The production staff replied to my inquiry to the editor to say that yes, we will be able to have references that point to a specific page number. This was a big relief to me. It requires extra work, but makes the book so much more valuable as a reference work in my opinion. To see why, look at the top of page 151 in the first section, which just refers to chapters and sections by their titles: “See… the “Tools” section…” Now try to find the “Tools” section. If it took you a while… well, the first time I did it, I missed it, and thought it might mean the Tools Chapter. The second edition will say “The X section on page Y” or similar. (Okay, I’ll shut up about this now — everyone has to have a pet peeve, eh?)
• We are currently at 425 pages in OpenOffice.org Writer, which by my calculations puts us around 470 pages in print. As I said before, I think we’ll break 500 pages by the time we finish the rest of the missing material.
• Andrew Aksyonoff has contributed an appendix on the Sphinx full-text search system. If you don’t know anything about it, check it out. It’s an amazing piece of software that does a lot more than just full-text search.

Well, I’ve run out of my allotted thirty minutes of blogging! Back to the salt mines! Just kidding… I’m actually off to the climbing gym soon to get my mind off it.

We’ve begun writing the second edition of the now-classic High Performance MySQL. “We” means co-authors Arjen Lentz (formerly of MySQL), Baron Schwartz (that’s me), and Vadim Tkachenko and Peter Zaitzev, both formerly of MySQL’s high-performance team and now partners at Percona, a high-performance MySQL consultancy firm and host of the popular MySQL Performance Blog. Neither of the first edition’s authors (Jeremy Zawodny and Derek Balling) is working on this project, but they’re with us in spirit, I think. O’Reilly is still the publisher, and Andy Oram is still the editor.

Though we’re theoretically revising and updating the first edition, we’re actually starting from scratch and re-writing the book. We’re expanding it from the first edition’s 265 pages to 384, according to the contract, but my unofficial guess is it’ll go well over 400 pages. A lot has changed since Jeremy and Derek wrote the first edition — high performance MySQL is a bigger subject today, with different techniques, tools and technologies, and of course a much more complicated MySQL server. The second edition will remain the definitive reference for building high-performance, scalable systems with MySQL.

We’re early in the process, so it’s hard to know how far into the future we can safely look. Still, just to whet your appetite, here’s the table of contents:

1. Preface
2. Back to basics
3. MySQL Architecture
4. Finding Bottlenecks: Profiling and Benchmarks
5. Schema Optimization and indexing
6. Query Performance Optimization
7. Advanced SQL Functionality
8. Optimizing Server Settings
9. Operating System and Hardware Optimization
10. Scaling and High Availability
11. Application Level Optimization
12. Backup and Recovery
13. Security
14. Analyzing Server Status
15. Tools for High Performance

Stay tuned for more news as the book progresses. The four of us plan to blog as we go.