Xaprb

Whew! I just finished a marathon of revisions. It’s been a while since I posted about our progress, so here’s an update for the curious readers.

I just finished revising the last two major chapters that Peter Zaitsev hasn’t yet reviewed. Peter has been essentially going through the chapters like a very thorough technical reviewer. He makes corrections, points out where things aren’t clear or need examples, and adds more material.

By “finished revising,” I mean finished expanding the outline into a full chapter. We’re still working at the level of “this chapter is mostly there, but we might decide to revise it more.” We will most certainly do so in many cases. There are some chunks of material that I’ve marked TODO to put into other chapters, for example. We’re not at the level of a final draft with any chapter except the chapter on MySQL’s architecture, but we’re getting close with the others now.

Most of the chapters are in tech review now, and we’ve gotten a few of them back. The comments from the reviewers have been very helpful. We expanded the Replication chapter quite a bit after tech review. (And then Peter reviewed it and we expanded it even more). When the tech reviewers return comments on the other chapters, we’ll revise some more.

We’re up to 529 pages in OpenOffice.org now. At my calculated ratio of 1 page = 1.1 pages in print, that’s about 582 pages in print. And that’s not counting the Replication chapter, which doesn’t have all of its illustrations yet. I predicted we’d break 500 pages; we might get close to 600. These are very, very densely written, too. No offense to the first edition, but the tone is quite different; much less light-hearted banter, much more compressed information. Peter is a walking encyclopedia, and never seems to run out of details we really ought to include because they’re important (and they are).

We may, or may not, go to production in the next few weeks. Regardless, I think we’re still on track to have the book on shelves by the MySQL Conference & Expo in April. Look for me there. I’ll be easy to find: I’ll be the tall guy with a permanent silly grin. (You’d grin too if you finished writing a book that’s been this much work!)

I’ve posted rough outlines for many of the other chapters. The two Peter and I just finished working on are the Scaling/HA/Load-Balancing/Failover chapter, and the Application-Level Optimization chapter. The Scaling/HA chapter is pretty long and very involved, and goes into a lot of detail on scaling in particular, especially horizontal scaling via sharding. (We use “sharding” because it’s less confusing than calling it “partitioning,” which already means too many different things in databases).

The Application-Level Optimization chapter is a little shorter. It’s mostly about caching strategies, how to make a web server run well, and so on. These aren’t what the book focuses on directly, but you can either help or hurt the database server a lot with your application design. Our goal here is to help people avoid the common mistakes.

For the curious, here’s the current outline for these two chapters:

Scaling and High Availability
  Terminology
  Scaling MySQL
    Planning for Scalability
    Buying Time Before Scaling
    Scaling Up
    Scaling Out
      Functional Partitioning
      Data Sharding
      Choosing a Partitioning Key
        Multiple Partitioning Keys
      Querying Across Shards
      Allocating Data, Shards, and Nodes
        Arranging Shards on Nodes
      Fixed Allocation
      Dynamic Allocation
        Mixing Dynamic and Fixed Allocation
      Explicit Allocation
      Sidebar: Re-Balancing Shards
      Tools for Sharding
    Scaling Back
      Keeping Active Data Separate
    Scaling by Clustering
      Clustering
      Federation
  Load Balancing
    Connecting Directly
      Splitting Reads and Writes in Replication
      Changing Application Configuration
      Changing DNS Names
      Moving IP Addresses
    Introducing a Middleman
      MySQL Proxy
      Load Balancers
    Load Balancing Algorithms
      Adding and Removing Servers in the Pool
    Load Balancing with a Master and Multiple Slaves
  High Availability
    Planning for High Availability
    Adding Redundancy
      Shared-Storage Architectures
      Replicated-Disk Architectures
      Synchronous MySQL Replication
    Failover and Failback
      Promoting a Slave or Switching Roles
      Virtual IP Addresses or IP Takeover
      MySQL Master-Master Replication Manager
      Middleman Solutions
      Handling Failover in the Application

And here’s the outline for the Application-Level Optimization chapter:

Application-Level Optimization
  Application Performance Overview
    Find the Source of the Problem
    Look for Common Problems
  Web Server Issues
    Finding the Optimal Concurrency
  Caching
    Sidebar: Caching Doesn't Always Help
    Caching Below the Application
    Application-Level Caching
    Cache Control Policies
    Cache Object Hierarchies
    Pre-Generating Content
  Extending MySQL
  Alternatives to MySQL

The thing that makes me the happiest right now is that we’re clearly going to make it. For a while, there was just so much work left to do that it was impossible to estimate how much. (Ask my wife: I was wrong many times when she asked how long it would take me to finish a chapter). I also didn’t know how much revision would be necessary, which is very scary; revising takes about four times as long as writing a first draft, by my reckoning. At this point, the remaining work is much smaller, and much easier to estimate. And now I no longer flip-flop daily between “I think we can, I think we can” and “please don’t ask, because I don’t know and I want a vacation.”

Subversion shows me that Peter has the Security chapter locked right now. This one is not a huge one, and Arjen Lentz has already reviewed it as well, so I don’t expect it to be a huge amount of work to revise. After that, it’s minor chapters and appendices. (We might actually convert the chapters on Server Status and Tools into appendices, since they got cannibalized when we realized their material fit better elsewhere. They also don’t have a very chapter-ish feel; they feel more like appendices). We’ve added a few more appendices, including one on EXPLAIN and one on debugging server and storage-engine locking problems. These are all great reference material.

See you at the conference in April!

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.