Xaprb

It’s been a while since I’ve written about progress on the book. I actually stopped working on it as much at the beginning of the month, because on October 31st I managed to finish a first draft of the last big chapter (Scaling and High Availability)! Now I’m back to full-time work at my employer, and I’m working on the book in the evenings and weekends only.

This doesn’t mean the book is close to being done, though. The editor is sending out some chapters for technical review, and there’s still a lot more writing and revising to be done.

Last weekend I revised the Security chapter from the first edition, which I think will be the only chapter that we’ll just revise and update, rather than completely rewriting (well, maybe the Architecture chapter could be considered a revision instead of a rewrite, but it’s a stretch; we changed it a lot). I removed a lot of the material that repeated the MySQL manual, and added a lot of information and best practices on grants, new privileges and objects in MySQL 5, common tasks, common mistakes, and so on. The chapter ended up being nearly as long, even though I stripped out all the code listings and so on from the first edition (in fact, I reduced the first edition’s material to a few paragraphs).

Beyond that, though, there are little details to finish out in many of the chapters. Examples that need to be finished, figures that need to be re-drawn, material that doesn’t quite fit and needs to be re-arranged or even moved to another chapter; it’s a lot of work. Peter Zaitsev has been reviewing some of the core chapters on query and schema optimization etc, and I’m revising them in response to his comments. That’s what I spent today doing.

I think the biggest chunks of work that remain are going to be making chapters 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 (benchmarking, profiling, schema, indexing, query optimization, advanced features, and server tuning) flow together well. The challenge here is how to organize the vast amount of material so it reads well, without too many forward references, and still be useful as a reference work. The detail we’ve gone into is incredible. It makes it very hard to find the single best place to mention each little bit of wisdom, because all of this material is completely inter-related. It’s tough to flatten the graph of knowledge into a one-dimensional narrative.

It’s not just these chapters that have a lot of inter-related material, of course. It’s hard to talk about tuning the server settings (chapter 7) without bringing the OS and hardware (chapter 8) into it, and whenever you do this you also need to think about measuring and monitoring status information (chapter 14). Of course, you need to do that for benchmarking and profiling, too (chapter 3). I’m sure you see the dilemma!

The good news is, if we succeed in doing this well, you will find the book enormously useful. Stay tuned!

I’ve been trying to circle back and clean up things I left for later in several chapters of High Performance MySQL, second edition. This includes a lot of material in chapter 4, Schema Optimization and Indexing. At some point I’ll write more about the process of writing this book, and what we’ve done well and what we’ve learned to do better, but for right now I wanted to complete the picture of what material we have on schema, index, and query optimization. The last two chapters I’ve written about (Query Performance Optimization and Advanced MySQL Features) have generated lots of feed back along the lines of “don’t forget X!” to which I’m obliged to reply “It’s in a different chapter.”

The truth is, it’s difficult to separate these topics sensibly. I’d like to do it in the mythical “perfect” way that serializes into a nice narrative without cross-references, but even the perfectionist in me wilts under the glare of deadlines. As a result, I don’t know if it’s really possible for us to completely avoid cross-references. (I do know there’s room for improvement in how we’ve arranged the material, but I’ve spent a lot of the day today trying to de-dupe some topics we wrote about in two places, and I’m coming to appreciate that re-organizing is an extraordinary amount of work, especially in OpenOffice.org — but more on that later).

All this is a preface to the following sentence: schema, indexing, advanced features, and query optimization are intermingled to some extent in the three chapters, even though we tried to separate the topics sensibly. I haven’t yet taken some of the suggestions I got in comments on the last chapter I posted. Like I said, reorganizing is a lot of work :-)

Here’s the outline. I have the same kinds of questions as before: what are we forgetting, do you have any questions or topics you’d like us to cover, etc? Comments are welcome.

[Update: I forgot to mention the vital statistics. So far it's about 55 pages printed.]

[Intro]
Choosing Optimal Data Types
  General Guidelines for Data Storage
    Smaller is Usually Better
    To NULL or not to NULL?
    Choose Identifiers Carefully
  How to Choose a Good Data Type
    Numeric Types
    BIT Strings
    String Types
      [sidebar: Generosity can be Unwise]
    BLOB and TEXT Types
      [sidebar: How to Avoid On-Disk Temporary Tables]
    Using ENUM Instead of a String Type
    Date and Time Types
      [sidebar: Watch out for automatic migration programs]
Indexing Basics
  Types of Indexes
    BTREE Indexes
      Types of Queries that can Use a BTREE Index
      Indexed Column Isolation
    Prefix Indexes
    HASH Indexes
    Rolling Your Own HASH Indexes
    RTREE Indexes
    FULLTEXT Indexes
    Clustered Indexes
    Covering Indexes
  Index Scans and Using Indexes for Sorting
  Packed (Prefix-Compressed) Indexes
  Redundant and Duplicate Indexes
  Indexes and Locking
  Indexing Strategies
  An Indexing Case Study
    Supporting Many Kinds of Filtering
    Avoiding Multiple Range Conditions
    Optimizing Sorts
  Index and Table Maintenance 
    Finding and Repairing Table Corruption
    Updating Index Statistics
    Reducing Index Fragmentation
Normalization and Denormalization
  Pros and Cons of a Normalized Schema 
  Pros and Cons of a Denormalized Schema
  A Mixture of Normalized and Denormalized
  Cache and Summary Tables
    [sidebar: The Principle of Faster SELECT and Slower UPDATE]
Notes on Storage Engines
  MyISAM
  Memory
  InnoDB

Here’s a snippet of “what it’s like to write this book” that I’ll throw out there. OpenOffice.org, at least the version I’m using, doesn’t like O’Reilly’s custom heading styles and won’t show me an outline view of the document. I’m copying and pasting into this blog post by scrolling from one heading to the next. This is always enlightening, because as you can see a lot of the material isn’t organized correctly in the hierarchy. Guess what, it’s my first look at the chapter’s real outline, too! This isn’t the outline we planned to have, but the chapter evolved because of making localized changes without any real way to zoom out and make sure the outline still made sense. So my two comments on this are a) OpenOffice.org hasn’t been the most helpful tool in some ways and b) these blog posts are, to some extent, airing the project’s dirty laundry (illogical outlining, difficult separation of material among chapters, etc). I’m not afraid of that; I think it’s healthy and will help the book be better as a result. I guess my experience with open source, combined with my employer’s open-books policy, has taught me to embrace transparency instead of fearing it. In the end this material will be organized and make a lot of sense, but that’s a process of evolution — not intelligent design.

As I said, at some point I’ll write more about the process of writing. It’s been educational, and most bloggers I know who’ve written a book don’t say much about it (they just pop their heads up every now and then to apologize for not blogging). Very briefly: if you dream of writing a book, do it. It helps that my boss and co-workers support me in this venture, but it’s worth it regardless.