Final Thoughts - MySQL

Now that you've reached this final page, it means that we're finishing up this series. Hopefully you have found its segments educational and informative. At the least, you should have developed a sense of what high performance MySQL tuning and optimization is about, and know how to imagine optimization "sessions" and such.

We can't stress enough that optimizing MySQL server instances and databases (and generally any kind of server) is a sensitive task since there are just way too many factors. All of them highly depend on your setup, requirements, and data. Different organizations have different purposes and database needs, thus totally different queries are to be answered as responsively as possible, on a variety of server specifications.

Fortunately for us, since MySQL is the most popular open-source cross-platform database solution, there are literally tons of discussions circulating around tweaks and optimizations. Conferences are done all over the world where hundreds of DBAs and experts in their field gather together to share their findings in order to achieve bleeding edge performance from their MySQL runs.

Moreover, this means that there is a lot of information out there spread over the Internet within various blog entries and forum posts, but let's not exclude the dozens of books and tutorials that have been written on the topic. Lots of them are also frequently updated (new tweaks, new releases, etc.).

What you need to develop is the skill to get the most out of that information, adapt everything to your own needs, and you'll reap astonishing rewards. Keep in mind, just because some say that such and such improves performance by a great deal, don't take that statement for granted. Also, be careful because there are tweaks that can alter the behavior of MySQL (are they safe?). Others give performance boosts only randomly.

Summing these up, we truly think that by reading this multi-part article series we have opened a new world of endless possibilities for you. You should learn to love tweaking!

In closing, I'd like to invite you to join our experienced community of technology professionals on all areas of IT&C starting from software and hardware up to consumer electronics at Dev Hardware Forums. As well, be sure to check out the community of our sister site at Dev Shed Forums. We are friendly and we'll do our best to help you.