Efficient MySQL Performance

Book Rating: 5 of 5

Efficient MySQL Performance by Daniel Nichter is the best MySQL book since the venerable “High Performance MySQL” second edition. (I have not read the third edition). Efficient is good because it is entirely focused on MySQL and it does it quickly. The book is ~300 pages and can be read in 20-30 hours. The book is easily read. I felt like the semi-conversational style that Daniel used made the book less dry.

Daniel maintains a excellent blog with content to complement the book here. Content that was omitted or did not fit in the book can be found there.

If you are an application developer who needs to work with MySQL I strongly recommend you get and read this book. I will save you a great deal of time. The sections on indexing and using explain with MySQL will pay for themselves. For generic indexing advice Markus Winand’s SQL Performance Explained is probably a better resource. But if you hare ONLY using MySQL I recommend Efficient over SQL Performance.

My criticisms of Efficient are:

• The chapter on Sharding is a little soft. Its not really something I would advise someone reading if they need to shard an application tomorrow. Its probably better suited for a quick introduction to the concepts of sharding and not much else. I also think its probably too MySQL centric.
  If you need to shard in 2022 you should probably think through your options beyond using MySQL.
• The cloud chapter feels like a quick bolt-on that didn’t really fit with the rest of the book.

As a technical book I got immediate benefits from reading Efficient and if you work with MySQL a lot you will too.