Chapter 3. MySQL Overview and New Performance-Related Features

With an ever-growing market share and a continual stream of new software and functionality, MySQL AB's products have made a dramatic impact on the technology industry. New versions, features, and functions are arriving at an increasing pace, but database designers, developers, and administrators might feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of products, along with how frequently they're updated.

Although the primary purpose of this book is to help you coax the most performance out of your MySQL installation, you should first get the lay of the land of MySQL's entire product suite. To help make things clear, each of the major products can be classified into a small group of categories. In addition, this chapter describes how they are covered within this book, and also mentions some helpful performance-related tools that now ship with the products.

After reviewing the product line, this chapter briefly calls out the versions that are covered in this book, along with some of the platforms that we tested when making our recommendations.

Finally, this chapter lists all of MySQL's major performance enhancements beginning with version 4.0. This list might help you determine when it's time to upgrade (if you're an existing user) or which version to choose (if you're new to MySQL).