InnoDB
is a general-purpose storage engine that
balances high reliability and high performance. In MySQL
8.4, InnoDB
is the default MySQL
storage engine. Unless you have configured a different default
storage engine, issuing a CREATE
TABLE
statement without an ENGINE
clause creates an InnoDB
table.
Key Advantages of InnoDB
Its DML operations follow the ACID model, with transactions featuring commit, rollback, and crash-recovery capabilities to protect user data. See Section 17.2, “InnoDB and the ACID Model”.
Row-level locking and Oracle-style consistent reads increase multi-user concurrency and performance. See Section 17.7, “InnoDB Locking and Transaction Model”.
InnoDB
tables arrange your data on disk to optimize queries based on primary keys. EachInnoDB
table has a primary key index called the clustered index that organizes the data to minimize I/O for primary key lookups. See Section 17.6.2.1, “Clustered and Secondary Indexes”.To maintain data integrity,
InnoDB
supportsFOREIGN KEY
constraints. With foreign keys, inserts, updates, and deletes are checked to ensure they do not result in inconsistencies across related tables. See Section 15.1.20.5, “FOREIGN KEY Constraints”.
Table 17.1 InnoDB Storage Engine Features
Feature | Support |
---|---|
B-tree indexes | Yes |
Backup/point-in-time recovery (Implemented in the server, rather than in the storage engine.) | Yes |
Cluster database support | No |
Clustered indexes | Yes |
Compressed data | Yes |
Data caches | Yes |
Encrypted data | Yes (Implemented in the server via encryption functions; In MySQL 5.7 and later, data-at-rest encryption is supported.) |
Foreign key support | Yes |
Full-text search indexes | Yes (Support for FULLTEXT indexes is available in MySQL 5.6 and later.) |
Geospatial data type support | Yes |
Geospatial indexing support | Yes (Support for geospatial indexing is available in MySQL 5.7 and later.) |
Hash indexes | No (InnoDB utilizes hash indexes internally for its Adaptive Hash Index feature.) |
Index caches | Yes |
Locking granularity | Row |
MVCC | Yes |
Replication support (Implemented in the server, rather than in the storage engine.) | Yes |
Storage limits | 64TB |
T-tree indexes | No |
Transactions | Yes |
Update statistics for data dictionary | Yes |
To compare the features of InnoDB
with other
storage engines provided with MySQL, see the Storage
Engine Features table in
Chapter 18, Alternative Storage Engines.
InnoDB Enhancements and New Features
For information about InnoDB
enhancements and new
features, refer to:
The
InnoDB
enhancements list in Section 1.4, “What Is New in MySQL 8.4 since MySQL 8.0”.The Release Notes.
Additional InnoDB Information and Resources
For
InnoDB
-related terms and definitions, see the MySQL Glossary.For a forum dedicated to the
InnoDB
storage engine, see MySQL Forums::InnoDB.InnoDB
is published under the same GNU GPL License Version 2 (of June 1991) as MySQL. For more information on MySQL licensing, see http://www.mysql.com/company/legal/licensing/.