3 Must-Read Books About Database Performance

SQL Performance Explained: Everything Developers Need to Know about SQL Performance

An in-depth book on how to improve database performance. The focus is on relational databases and it covers all major SQL databases without getting lost in the details of any one specific product. Starting with the basics of indexing and the WHERE clause, SQL Performance Explained guides developers through all parts of an SQL statement and explains the pitfalls of object-relational mapping (ORM) tools like Hibernate.

PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance

An excellent book for intermediate to advanced PostgreSQL database administrators (DBA). Teaches everything about building, monitoring and maintaining a PostgreSQL installation while also providing useful and interesting information about database internals. If you truly want to understand how PostgreSQL operates and behaves under a high load this is a book for you.

High Performance MySQL: Optimization, Backups, and Replication

Advanced techniques for everything from designing schemas, indexes, and queries to tuning your MySQL server, operating system, and hardware to their fullest potential. This guide also teaches you safe and practical ways to scale applications through replication, load balancing, high availability, and failover.

DatabasePack Beta: Database-as-a-Service for testing

DatabasePack is a new service that provides access to all major versions of MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQL Server. The service makes testing code on multiple database versions easier because they are already hosted and are available just a few clicks away. Usually you would need to setup all databases and their different versions manually, and if you have tried that you probably know how frustrating that can be. Hosting each database version on a separate server could also get quite expensive and would be a maintenance hell. DatabasePack is powered by Docker, an open platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship, and run distributed applications.

Screenshot of DatabasePack Web Interface

Apart from offering databases as a service, they plan to launch a feature for test data generation. It would help to create extensive test data automatically, but DatabasePack also supports importing CSV, SQL or JSON files.

The service is currently in beta, but you can request an invite on their landing page.