High Performance MySQL [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Software Versions and Availability

Writing a
MySQL
book has proven to be quite a challenge. One reason is that MySQL is
a moving target. In the two-plus years since Jeremy first wrote the
outline for this book, numerous releases of MySQL have appeared.
MySQL 4.0 went from testing to stable, and as we go to press, MySQL
4.1 and 5.0 are both available as alpha versions. We had to revise
the older text occasionally to remove references to limitations that
were fixed after the fact.^[2]

^[2] Note to budding authors:
write as fast as you can. The longer you drag it out, the more work
you have to do.

We didn't use a single version of MySQL for this
book. Instead, we used a handful of MySQL 4.0 and 4.1 releases, while
occasionally looking back at how things used to be in the 3.23 days.
MySQL 5.0 is still in so much flux that we simply could not attempt
to cover it in the first edition. The same is true for the
(currently) new MySQL Administrator GUI tool.

Throughout this book, we assume a baseline version of MySQL 4.0.14
and have made an effort to note features or functionality that may
not exist in older releases or that may exist only in the 4.1 series.
However, the definitive reference for mapping features to specific
versions is the MySQL documentation itself. We
expect that you'll find yourself visiting the
annotated online documentation (http://www.mysql.com/doc/) from time to time
as you read this book.

Another great aspect of
MySQL
is that it runs on all of today's popular platforms:
Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD: you name it! However, our
experience is heavily skewed toward Linux and FreeBSD. When possible,
we've tried to note differences Windows users are
likely to encounter, which tend to come in two flavors. First, file
paths are completely different.
Chapter 1
contains numerous references to C:\mysql and the
location of configuration files on Windows.

Perl is the other rough spot when dealing with MySQL on Windows.
MySQL comes with several useful utilities that are written in Perl
and certain chapters in this book present example Perl scripts that
form the basis of more complex tools you'll build.
However, Windows doesn't come with Perl. In order to
use these scripts, you'll
need to download a Windows version of Perl from ActiveState and
install the necessary add-on modules (DBI and
DBD::mysql) for MySQL access.