MySQL Documentation: About MySQL Documentation

About MySQL Documentation

All of the MySQL documentation is written in-house, by a team of full-time technical writers. They include:

  • Stefan Hinz, Team Lead
  • Paul DuBois
  • Jonathan Stephens
  • Martin 'MC' Brown
  • Anthony Bedford

All of the documentation is written in DocBook XML and then processed by various open-source tools, and custom in-house written utilities, into the various output formats. If you want to understand how most of these systems work, please visit the MySQL Guide to Documentation.

Some basic statistics and information about the documentation (November 2009):

  • We currently build over 850 separate pieces of documentation, based on 135 different guides and their various output formats. We cover a range of about 16 languages across the range of different documents.
  • In English alone we generate 91 different base documents, each available in one of the 14 different output types.
  • Most documentation is available in HTML online, HTML downloadable, PDF and CHM formats, with the HTML collections being available in Tar/Gzip, Zip, and RPM formats. For the reference manual, we also provide Unix man pages, Texinfo, and SQL help that you can insert tables within your MySQL server and access through your MySQL client.
  • All of the DocBook XML is available within the Subversion repositories we use to check in and record the documentation and changes. You can access the trees here.
  • Documentation is rebuilt daily - every day (including weekends and holidays). In fact, a new build of the documentation is started every single time we check in a change to the Subversion repository. This can mean that we start a build up to 150 times a day. In reality, most of the documentation is recreated between five and ten times each day. New versions are made available within an hour of being built.
  • A reference manual is currently split into about 2,500 individual pages for viewing online. This means that across all the manual versions we publish in English there are about 14,000 individual pages online.
  • In PDF terms, a typical reference manual generates over 3000 pages of printable material, or over 15,000 pages across all our reference manuals. The additional guides and documents that we produce add about another 4000 pages to that output. That equates to over 20,000 pages of English documentation.