I guess that's how many zillions of people started using MYSQL - including me. ordering a 40$/yr space already includes mySql and you don't use it for your private page until you install some script or setup a blog… well…

After using mysql for 1,5 years I really wondered if increased machine power is the only way to make it faster or if "they" implemented some other features as I know them from my decade of Oracle experience.

Then I came across Jeremy D. Zawodny's book actually both – reading his great weblog and from a review in a print mag some days later… well – ordered and read almost 60% of the book the first day – great introductional chapters…

Jeremy's book is some what the "Oracle Concepts Manual" for mySql. Jeremy is the mySQL guru at yahoo and should know what he's writing about… (did you know Yahoo still runs on mySql ?)

What I really loved was the conceptual introduction to get an idea "where" mySql currently is.

• did you know, you can choose a different transaction engine per table? (altough mixing transactions with non-transactional tables doesn't make sense for many applications…)

• did you know that the InnoDB engine was written by a guy who knew Oracle very very well and many of their ideas and words are much more familiar than the non-relational mySql slang of the old myIsam world? I found myself crashing the DB after a huge 3,5 million copy table transaction just to find the whole thing starting a redo-recover after restart of the database… applying all redo-logs … or at least wanting to (I could avoid that with a "force_recover"-switch, which is very very useful)

• did you know that the whole data storage and transaction processing is transparent to the application, so that you could switch a table from myIsam to InnoDB format to get full row-level locking for a mostly inserted table (e.g. logging table)?

• did you know you can create a "memory-only" table for some cool temp table stuff without IOs (if you have enough memory)

• did you know mySql features execution plan analysis and a slow-query feature where you can let your host log all queries slower than xxx seconds for later analysis… fantastic… I have not found such a feature for Oracle during my work and studies – altough it might have been added in 9 or 10…

after the concepts Jeremy explains several strategies and tools to use for the real thing – performance evaluation, benchmarking and tuning…

This book even inspired me to create a new mySql category, as I am sure, I will gain some experiences on mySql as they release the 5.0 including stored procedures and all the other new stuff.