If you are a webmaster and you run a dedicated server, you might want to watch this video and learn some insights into MySQL performance tuning.
Jay Pipes, MySQL employee and co-author Pro MySQL, gave a great presentation to Google employees which covers a number of techniques for tuning performance on MySQL. His examples include debugging and analyzing problems as well as best practices for table and index design, query and join operations, and server variable adjustments.
– catonmat
Other interesting stuff at Zedomax.com: best practices, co author, dedicated-server, Google, index design, insights, pipes