Every day, PHP devs around the world are approached by stakeholders or managers and asked the same question..."Can't we make our application faster?" Forget adding more RAM, OpCode caching or load balancing - often the problem is much more obvious - mySQL. Every PHP developer knows how to query a table, join tables and many even do funky sub selects and unions, but not everyone knows how mySQL handles all this 'under the hood'. Some developers might be lucky enough to have a DBA to worry about all that - but most of us don't. Covering 8 of the most common issues and tools related to mySQL performance, any PHP developer will be able to soup up their mySQL install like a DBA ninja. http://www.absolute-design.co.uk/absolute-php-mysql/img0.html