Rating: 

If you interact with MySQL on a regular basis, High Performance MySQL should be the next book that you read. High Performance MySQL does a great job at covering techniques on benchmarking your current configuration and how to increase performance at 3 major levels: 1) database architecture, 2) server tuning, and 3) scaling horizontally (with multiple servers).

Database architecture is where it really begins. Zawodny and Balling did a great job explaining the different storage engines along with their advantages and disadvantages, working with transactions, how to get the most of your database through indexing and how to optimize query performance.

Zawodny and Balling also did an excellent job on covering server tuning. It just wasn’t a turtorial on ‘this is how you should modify your configuration files.’ The authors whent into great detail in explaining different hardware configurations, what to look for in RAID configurations and different filesystems, and how to solve various bottlenecks.

For the most part, the authors reserved a complete 60 pages of the book for Replicaiton and Load Balancing configurations. The authors provided several scenarios to choose from along with the advantages and disadvantages of each.