OSDC - The Open Source Developers' Club

Intended audience: developers with basic proficiency in using MySQL, target version is 4.1.x - differences with 5.1.x will be noted accordingly.

The talk aims to provide a description of the database normalisation process. Using a series of simple, practical examples I aim to introduce Normal Form 1 through 4, and provide a few reasons why normalisation is an important and useful process. Finally I'll present a couple of scenarios where blindly following normalisation techniques can have a detrimental effect.

Optimisation techniques I intend to cover include:

• Why developers need to keep database efficiency in mind
• Tell-tale signs that a database is suffering performance related issues
• Enabling and using query logging (general and slow)
• Indexing issues when using a temporal data field as a primary key
• A few useful MySQL operations ( SHOW CREATE TABLE, SHOW INDEX FROM, SHOW ERRORS, SHOW TABLE STATUS )

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