Chapter 9. Developing High-Speed Applications

Up to this point, the book has been focusing on how to select a MySQL storage engine, design and index your tables, and write optimal SQL; coming up later are suggestions on how to tune your MySQL storage engines. Right now, it's time to pay attention to developing swift application software to make the most of your efficient MySQL database.

Because concurrency is so vital to good performance on a multiuser MySQL database server, this chapter begins by examining the interplay between concurrency considerations (such as locking and transaction isolation levels) and database responsiveness. After that topic has been explored, the chapter moves on to explaining how stored procedures, functions, and triggers all have a role to play in speeding your MySQL-based solution.

Developers building a MySQL-based solution have a surfeit of language and connector alternatives. To help these developers, regardless of their choice of application development technology, the chapter closes with a compilation of ideas to help improve application logic performance.

Before beginning this chapter, it's worth repeating an observation that has been made throughout the book: A well-performing MySQL-based solution begins with a good design, followed in turn by wise index deployment and optimal SQL. By the time application code is ready to be written, the performance characteristics of the solution have already been mostly predetermined.

In other words, world-class application logic bogs down when confronted with a horrendously structured database that suffers from incorrect indexing. On the other hand, the sloppiest application code often appears to be worthy of worldwide acclaim when, in fact, the database, indexes, and queries have been designed with performance in mind.