Chapter 9. Mastering MySQL

Chapter 8 provided you with a good grounding in the practice of using relational databases with structured query language. You’ve learned about creating databases and the tables that comprise them, as well as inserting, looking up, changing, and deleting data.

With that knowledge under your belt, we now need to look at how to design databases for maximum speed and efficiency. For example, how do you decide what data to place in which table? Well, over the years, a number of guidelines have been developed that—if you follow them—ensure that your databases will be efficient and capable of growing as you feed them more and more data.