Miscellaneous Useful Topics

In the last chapter and the book’s appendixes, we delve into several topics that either don’t fit well into any of the earlier chapters, or are referenced often enough in multiple chapters that they deserve a bit of special attention.

Chapter 16, Tools for MySQL Users explores some of the open source and commercial tools that can help you manage and monitor your MySQL servers more efficiently.

Appendix A introduces the three major unofficial versions of MySQL that have arisen over the last few years, including the one that our company maintains. It’s worth knowing what else is available; many problems that are difficult or intractable with MySQL are solved elegantly by one of the variants. Two of the three (Percona Server and MariaDB) are drop-in replacements, so the effort involved in trying them out is not large. However, we hasten to add that we think most users are well served by sticking with the official MySQL distribution from Oracle.