MySQL Summary
MySQL is the most popular database engine in use on the web. It is entirely open source and is released under the GNU General Public License.
MySQL is what is called a relational database management system (RDBMS). This means that it contains one or more tables and the tables can have relationships set up between them. This is what makes a database such as MySQL so much more powerful than other data structures such as flat files or spreadsheets.
As part of the LAMP stack, MySQL is the default database engine powering a large portion of the web.
MySQL Performance Optimisation
With today’s dynamic web sites, it is often the database side of things that is working the hardest to handle things like displaying pages, search results and allowing customers to place orders. Like many complex and powerful pieces of software, MySQL can be quite sensitive to proper configuration and optimsation. If your site is running slowly the culprit may well be a badly written database query or an under optimised MySQL configuration.
Edmonds Commerce can analyse your pages and the database queries powering them and can then make code or configuration changes that can have dramatic beneficial effects on your page load time and general server load.
Enterprise MySQL
For larger and busier web sites it is possible to use multiple MySQL servers as a group to give greater performance, reliability and resilience. The usual configuration is to have one master database which accepts updates and then a few slave databases that are read only and handle the bulk of the work for general page display.
If even more performance is required then more advanced clustering strategies can be employed such as partitioning and sharding.
If this kind of functionality is required then Enterprise customers might consider moving away from the open source MySQL database and into one of the commercial offerings.
MySQL Variants and Forks
Along with pure MySQL there are now a couple of popular MySQL variants that are based and compatible with MySQL but feature further optimisations and features. The most popular of these is the Percona and MariaDB. These are compatible with MySQL and can be dropped in place of MySQL with little effort and can give a good performance boost.
