Anchor Web hosting knowledgebase
The Anchor wiki is a collection of articles, tutorials, howto's and support guides focused on just one topic - web hosting. We hope these guides will be useful not just to our clients but the general public as well. So much of what we do at Anchor is so reliant on free and open source software that we thought it only appropriate to give back in some way.
Feature Article - MySQL Storage Engines
This article offers a discussion on the plethora of storage engines available for use with late releases of the MySQL database management system (DBMS). Our focus will be on the two most widely-deployed — and talked about — engines, InnoDB and MyISAM.
What is a storage engine?
It is not uncommon to hear of developers who have worked with MySQL for some time before realising that the root cause of their poor-performing application is a direct result of their choice of storage engine. This can seem confusing at first, as no conscious choice has often been made. Developers infrequently need to think about such low-level details by design: how your DBMS structures your high-level view of tables on disk is rarely significant to the task at hand, so it is abstracted away.
A MySQL storage engine is best thought of as the end of the line in terms of a query's reach into the DBMS. It is the storage engine's routines that govern the translation to on-disk, machine-friendly data formats (and the same in reverse). A storage engine will impose various functional limits on your application, some more significant than others. (Limitations for the InnoDB and MyISAM storage engines are discussed below.) Heavily-loaded applications that are functionally compatible with more than one storage engine may suffer performance setbacks when thoughtlessly paired with a particular engine. Complex, well-designed applications layered on top of MySQL are often designed to work with more than one storage engine to gain the best of all worlds. (more...)
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