Sunday, April 13, 2014

Book Review: Getting Started with MariaDB


Recently I was given a reviewer's copy of Getting Started with MariaDB from the publisher Packt Pub. The fact that I was given a copy of the book in exchange for a written review has in no way influenced my rating of the book.

Getting Started with MariaDB by Daniel Bartholomew is a quick introduction to MariaDB. At 100 pages in total (including front and back matter), it obviously cannot go deep in depth about things and must refer you out to the official documentation.

I liked the fact that the author took to the time to walk through examples of setting MariaDB up on Windows, Mac and Linux (sections for Debian based, Red Hat based and general). Chapter 5 is the most useful chapter as it is where you get to see working examples of using MariaDB.

While the book is a good introduction I felt that some things were mentioned that someone new to MariaDB wouldn't need to know. Things like the configuration file (my.ini/my.cnf) are mentioned but the author didn't talk about even the basic entries you might want to put in there. He also has a couple pages talking about the need for security at all levels (internet, intranet, building and server) which while is true, I didn't think that it warranted the mention in an introductory book. And sadly enough this is all mentioned before you learn how to perform basic CRUD operations. :(

One other thing that I found interesting is there is only the briefest mentions of indexing which I feel is a more important topic to a beginner than security and maintenance. Granted that in such a short book you can't put everything in, but indexing is a very important topic and is something someone new to databases needs to know about.

Overall this book should come in handy for someone new to MariaDB, and databases in general, that want to learn the very basics of this database server. However if you have any knowledge of databases already (especially MySQL which MariaDB is based off of), you will want to pass on this book.

For those who like to see actual ratings, I give the book a 3 out of 5 stars.

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