Further Reading
The Active Record and Mapper patterns are both taken from Martin Fowler's excellent Patterns of Enterprise Application Development. This is one of my favorite books, and I cannot recommend it enough. It provides whip-smart coverage of design patterns, especially data-to-object mapping patterns.
Database and even SQL tuning are very different from one RDBMS to another. Consult the documentation for your database system, and look for books that get high marks for covering that particular platform.
For MySQL, Jeremy Zawodny and Derek J. Balling's upcoming High Performance MySQL is set to be the authoritative guide on high-end MySQL tuning. The online MySQL documentation available from http://www.mysql.com is also excellent.
For Oracle, Guy Harrison's Oracle SQL High-Performance Tuning and Jonathan Lewis's Practical Oracle 8I: Building Efficient Databases are incredibly insightful texts that no Oracle user should be without.
A good general SQL text is SQL Performance Tuning by Peter Gulutzan and Trudy Pelzer. It focuses on tuning tips that generally coax at least 10% greater performance out of the eight major RDBMSs they cover, including DB2, Oracle, MSSQL, and MySQL.
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