Understanding Mysql Internals

Discovering and Improving a Great Database

MySQL’s source code is open in the sense of being publicly available, but it’s essentially closed to you if you don’t understand it. In this book, Sasha Pachev—a former member of the MySQL development team—provides a comprehensive tour of MySQL 5 that reveals the inner workings of this powerful database. You’ll go right to the heart of MySQL to learn how data structures and convenience functions operate, how to add new storage engines and configuration options, and much more.

Understanding MySQL Internals begins with an architecture overview that explains how the different components of MySQL work together. Next, you’ll learn steps for setting up a working, compilable copy of the code, and then you’ll work with basic frameworks for adding your own configuration variables and storage engine.

Other sections of this book cover:

• Core server classes, structures, and API
• The communication protocol between the client and the server
• Configuration variables, including a tutorial and code for adding your own
• Thread-based request handling and how threads are used in MySQL
• An overview of MySQL storage engines
• The storage engine interface for integrating third-party storage engines
• The table lock manager
• The parser and optimizer that execute SQL commands
• Integrating a transactional storage engine into MySQL
• The internals of replication

With descriptions of key data structures and methods not documented in the source code, Understanding MySQL Internals offers you the unprecedented opportunity to learn the inner workings of this enterprise-proven database. Whether you’re a developer, DBA, programmer, software vendor, or student, this is your guide to discovering and improving a great database.

About the Authors
Alexander "Sasha" Pachev has worked extensively with Linux since 1997 on corporate web servers, database servers, and desktops. Around that time he started working with the MySQL database, which led him to joining the MySQL Development Team in 2000. He wrote and maintained the MySQL replication module up until 2002 and authored "MySQL Enterprise Solutions" (Wiley). Sasha is also an elite marathon runner and has developed several software tools of interest to runners.