Beginning MySQL Database Design and Optimization: From Novice to Professional

Apress has done what many other publishers have failed to do by providing an excellent series of 'Novice to Professional' books. This book is pretty much a 'must have' for a MySQL programmer looking to bridge the gap between novice and professional. Beginning MySQL Database Design and Optimization is a great book for MySQL users who already know the basics and want to improve their use of MySQL. /a /p /blockquote p id='quoteAuthor' - Mike Hillyer, Mike Hillyer's Personal Web Space /p /div p Nearly every non-trivial application requires data persistence, and for an application of any significant size and scope, persistence is typically achieved using a database. If you're building or maintaining any significant application and are using MySQL, this book is for you. For open source and other types of projects, the MySQL database is a very popular choice: it's free; fast, robust, and scalable; and it runs on all of the major platforms, allowing maximum use of available hardware resources. But it's easy to disregard MySQL's speed and other advantages if your database design is inefficient. Needlessly duplicating data, using improper types for columns, overloading a single table where multiple tables should be used, failing to leverage the calculation features of MySQL, and making multiple queries instead of an efficient single query are some of the common mistakes. /p p Beginning MySQL Database Design and Optimization shows you how to identify, overcome, and avoid gross inefficiencies. It demonstrates how to maximize the many data manipulation features that MySQL includes. This book explains how to include tests and branches in your queries, how to normalize your database, and how to issue concurrent queries to boost performance, among many other design and optimization topics. You'll also learn about some features new to MySQL 4.1 and 5.0 like subqueries, stored procedures, and views, all of which will help you