Information About Examples

Founded during the height of the dot-com boom in 1999, High-Hat Airways has grown into the world's largest airline. Its unique blend of hip, in-your-face marketing, low prices, and creative corporate accounting helped propel the airline past sluggish industry dinosaurs.

Its fleet has expanded from one 20-year-old rented Boeing 737 to more than 550 planes. During the next year, more than 275 million customers will board a High-Hat flight and be greeted by the familiar "Go sit down over there!" from a friendly flight attendant.

The year 2002 saw the indictments of the CEO and CFO, along with the mysterious disappearance of four members of the Board of Directors. However, these setbacks proved to be mere road bumps on the path to success: The value of High-Hat's stock has grown thirtyfold in less than three years.

As part of its ongoing commitment to cost control, High-Hat Airways has decided to convert all internal systems to open source. Naturally, MySQL will be a cornerstone of this new philosophy. However, the already overburdened IT staff has a monumental task ahead: to consolidate 27 internal applications running on 11 different database platforms. The most important applications are as follows:

• Reservations

• Flight logistics and scheduling

• Catering

• Luggage management

• Loyalty programs

To make matters worse, the CIO has promised both internal users and the general public that High-Hat's systems will have the fastest response time in the industry. The CIO is also refereeing a religious war between Microsoft zealots and Linux enthusiasts. The result is that the new solutions will be evenly split between the two operating systems.

As you proceed through this book, you'll notice it continually refers to the challenges faced by the High-Hat Airways IT staff as they struggle to deliver quality, high-performance solutions based on MySQL. Luckily, very simple, easily implemented changes can result in massive speed gains, and that is what this book plans to help you achieve.

To keep things simple, this book introduces High-Hat's new applications, database structures, and engine configurations on an as-needed basis, in concert with the specific performance concept being examined at the time. This means that you can focus on MySQL optimization, rather than becoming an expert in the internal systems of High-Hat Airways. Finally, the database design, SQL, and code examples are always as simple and to-the-point as possible while still conveying the appropriate performance messages.