Well, to be fair, one of the very first questions I asked upon joining wikien-l was whether the database and webserver were on one host or two, with exactly that reasoning in mind. But I don't think I've written any well-known books... unless the Wikipedia itself counts? ;)

I believe Jimbo was talking about Ian Gilfillan, author of "Mastering MySQL 4", who posted a couple of suggestions back in February.

--Mark