This article shows you how to use a little-known InnoDB feature to find out what is holding the lock for which an InnoDB transaction is waiting. I then show you how to use an undocumented feature to make this even easier with innotop.

Excellent description by Adrian Cockcroft of how Amazon EBS works from a performance perspective, with a focus on multi-tenancy at the VM host, local disk and EBS disk levels.

This post contains links to a few different real-world datasets that can be used for populating databases for testing. The comments are good too, and include links to several more datasets.

Overview of sharding techniques.

Server Fault thread in which I found the answer to a question I had about nginx and chunked encoding - an answer I had written earlier myself!

Not presented as a flowchart, but that's what it feels like to me. A great step-by-step breakdown of tuning MySQL (including consideration of architecture, application and OS.)

An excellent article explaining the benefits of prematurely flushing the first part of the web server's response, in particular the page headers. Discusses chunked encoding and content compression as well.

Built-in MySQL procedure for analysing field values and determining the most optimal column type (possibly)

Cool script, and coolest domain name/installation method in the world.

Article suggesting that percona patched MySQL builds combined with mysqlsla are a better option than the MySQL Query Analyzer (proprietary, only available with a MySQL Enterprise subscription).

Mysql query analyzer uses mysql proxy underneath, which is a great thing in its own right.