Your MySQL instances are probably broken. Many developers face slow-running queries, issues related to database architecture, replication, or database security—and that’s only the beginning. This book will deliver answers to your most pressing MySQL database questions related to performance, availability, or security by uncovering what causes databases to break in the first place. At its core, this book provides you with the knowledge necessary for you to break your database instances so you can better optimize it for performance and secure it from data breaches. In other words, you’ll discover the sorts of actions, minor and major, that degrade databases so you can fix and ultimately preempt them. MySQL sometimes acts according to its own rules, and this book will help you keep it working on your terms. At the same time, you will learn to optimize your backup and recovery procedures, determine when and which data to index to achieve maximum performance, and choose the best MySQL configurations, among other essential skills. Most MySQL books focus exclusively on optimization, but this book argues that it’s just as important to pay attention to the ways databases break. Indeed, after reading this book, you will be able to safely break your database instances to expose and overcome the nuanced issues that affect performance, availability, and security.   What You Will Learn Know the basics of MySQL and the storage engines innoDB and MyISAM Spot the ways you are harming your database’s performance, availability and security without even realizing it Fix minor bugs and issues that have surprisingly serious impact Optimize schema, data types, queries, indexes, and partitions to head off issues Understand key MySQL security strategies   Who This Book Is For Database administrators, web developers, systems administrators, and security professionals with an intermediary knowledge of database management systems and building applications in MySQL