Chapter 18. Optimizing Your Database

In Chapter 17, "Optimizing Your MySQL Server Configuration, " we discussed how you can set up your server for optimal performance. In this chapter, we'll look at how you can optimize your database tables.

Common database design guidelines and normalization usually improve performance. There are also other choices you can make when working with your database design that will make the end product faster or slower. In this chapter, we will review these choices.

We will cover the following:

• What's slow in MySQL databases?

• Making the right design choices

• Using indexes for optimization

• Using OPTIMIZE TABLE