Chapter 14 The InnoDB Storage Engine

InnoDB in MySQL 5.5 contains several important new features:

Upward and Downward Compatibility

Note that the ability to use data compression and the new row format require the use of a new InnoDB file format called Barracuda. The previous file format, used by the built-in InnoDB in MySQL 5.1 and earlier, is now called Antelope and does not support these features, but does support the other features introduced with the InnoDB storage engine.

The InnoDB storage engine is upward compatible from standard InnoDB as built in to, and distributed with, MySQL. Existing databases can be used with the InnoDB Storage Engine for MySQL. The new parameter innodb_file_format can help protect upward and downward compatibility between InnoDB versions and database files, allowing users to enable or disable use of new features that can only be used with certain versions of InnoDB.

InnoDB since version 5.0.21 has a safety feature that prevents it from opening tables that are in an unknown format. However, the system tablespace may contain references to new-format tables that confuse the built-in InnoDB in MySQL 5.1 and earlier. These references are cleared in a slow shutdown.

With previous versions of InnoDB, no error would be returned until you try to access a table that is in a format “too new” for the software. To provide early feedback, InnoDB 1.1 checks the system tablespace before startup to ensure that the file format used in the database is supported by the storage engine. See Section 14.10.2.1, “Compatibility Check When InnoDB Is Started” for the details.

MySQL has a well-earned reputation for being easy-to-use and delivering performance and scalability. In previous versions of MySQL, MyISAM was the default storage engine. In our experience, most users never changed the default settings. With MySQL 5.5, InnoDB becomes the default storage engine. Again, we expect most users will not change the default settings. But, because of InnoDB, the default settings deliver the benefits users expect from their RDBMS: ACID Transactions, Referential Integrity, and Crash Recovery. Let's explore how using InnoDB tables improves your life as a MySQL user, DBA, or developer.

Trends in Storage Engine Usage

In the first years of MySQL growth, early web-based applications didn't push the limits of concurrency and availability. In recent years, hard drive and memory capacity and the performance/price ratio have all gone through the roof. Users pushing the performance boundaries of MySQL care a lot about reliability and crash recovery. MySQL databases are big, busy, robust, distributed, and important.

InnoDB addresses these top user priorities. The trend of storage engine usage has shifted in favor of the more scalable InnoDB. Thus MySQL 5.5 is the logical transition release to make InnoDB the default storage engine.

Consequences of InnoDB as Default MySQL Storage Engine

Starting from MySQL 5.5.5, the default storage engine for new tables is InnoDB. This change applies to newly created tables that don't specify a storage engine with a clause such as ENGINE=MyISAM. Given this change of default behavior, MySQL 5.5 might be a logical point to evaluate whether your tables that do use MyISAM could benefit from switching to InnoDB.

The mysql and information_schema databases, that implement some of the MySQL internals, still use MyISAM. In particular, you cannot switch the grant tables to use InnoDB.

Benefits of InnoDB Tables

If you use MyISAM tables but aren't tied to them for technical reasons, you'll find many things more convenient when you use InnoDB tables in MySQL 5.5:

Best Practices for InnoDB Tables

If you have been using InnoDB for a long time, you already know about features like transactions and foreign keys. If not, read about them throughout this chapter. To make a long story short:

Recent Improvements for InnoDB Tables (from the Plugin Era)

Testing and Benchmarking with InnoDB as Default Storage Engine

Even before completing your upgrade to MySQL 5.5, you can preview whether your database server or application works correctly with InnoDB as the default storage engine. To set up InnoDB as the default storage engine with an earlier MySQL release, either specify on the command line --default-storage-engine=InnoDB, or add to your my.cnf file default-storage-engine=innodb in the [mysqld] section, then restart the server.

Since changing the default storage engine only affects new tables as they are created, run all your application installation and setup steps to confirm that everything installs properly. Then exercise all the application features to make sure all the data loading, editing, and querying features work. If a table relies on some MyISAM-specific feature, you'll receive an error; add the ENGINE=MyISAM clause to the CREATE TABLE statement to avoid the error (for example, tables that rely on full-text search must be MyISAM tables rather than InnoDB ones).

If you did not make a deliberate decision about the storage engine, and you just want to preview how certain tables work when they're created under InnoDB, issue the command ALTER TABLE table_name ENGINE=InnoDB; for each table. Or, to run test queries and other statements without disturbing the original table, make a copy like so:

CREATE TABLE InnoDB_Table (...) ENGINE=InnoDB AS SELECT * FROM MyISAM_Table;
        

Since there are so many performance enhancements in the InnoDB that is part of MySQL 5.5, to get a true idea of the performance with a full application under a realistic workload, install the real MySQL 5.5 and run benchmarks.

Test the full application lifecycle, from installation, through heavy usage, and server restart. Kill the server process while the database is busy to simulate a power failure, and verify that the data is recovered successfully when you restart the server.

Test any replication configurations, especially if you use different MySQL versions and options on the master and the slaves.

Verifying that InnoDB is the Default Storage Engine

To know what the status of InnoDB is, whether you're doing what-if testing with an older MySQL or comprehensive testing with MySQL 5.5:

To determine whether your server supports InnoDB, use the SHOW ENGINES statement. (Now that InnoDB is the default MySQL storage engine, only very specialized environments might not support it.)

Oracle recommends InnoDB as the preferred storage engine for typical database applications, from single-user wikis and blogs running on a local system, to high-end applications pushing the limits of performance. As of MySQL 5.5, InnoDB is the default storage engine for new tables.

If you do not want to use InnoDB tables:

Starting with MySQL 5.4.2, you do not need to do anything special to get or install the most up-to-date InnoDB storage engine. From that version forward, the InnoDB storage engine in the server is what was formerly known as the InnoDB Plugin. Earlier versions of MySQL required some extra build and configuration steps to get the Plugin-specific features such as fast index creation and table compression.

Report any bugs in the InnoDB storage engine using the My Oracle Support site. For general discussions about InnoDB Storage Engine for MySQL, see http://forums.mysql.com/list.php?22.

Up to MySQL version 5.5.30, InnoDB storage engine releases are numbered with version numbers independent of MySQL releases. Starting with MySQL 5.5.30, the use of independent version numbering for the InnoDB storage engine is discontinued in favor of MySQL server version numbering.

The following information describes the InnoDB storage engine independent version numbering scheme and how to view the version number for the InnoDB storage engine.

The initial release of the InnoDB storage engine is version 1.0, and it is designed to work with MySQL 5.1. Version 1.1 of the InnoDB storage engine is for MySQL 5.5 and up.

Once you have installed the InnoDB storage engine, you can check its version number in three ways:

The InnoDB storage engine writes its version number to the error log, which can be helpful in diagnosis of errors:

091105 12:28:06 InnoDB Plugin 1.0.5 started; log sequence number 46509

Note that the PLUGIN_VERSION column in the table INFORMATION_SCHEMA.PLUGINS does not display the third component of the version number, only the first and second components, as in 1.0.

Because InnoDB 1.1 supports the “Barracuda” file format, with new on-disk data structures within both the database and log files, pay special attention to file format compatibility with respect to the following scenarios:

WARNING: Once you create any tables with the Barracuda file format, take care to avoid crashes and corruptions when using those files with an earlier version of MySQL. It is strongly recommended that you use a “slow shutdown” (SET GLOBAL innodb_fast_shutdown=0) when stopping the MySQL server before downgrading to MySQL 5.1 or earlier. This ensures that the log files and other system information do not cause consistency issues or startup problems when using a prior version of MySQL.

WARNING: If you dump a database containing compressed tables with mysqldump, the dump file may contain CREATE TABLE statements that attempt to create compressed tables, or those using ROW_FORMAT=DYNAMIC in the new database. Therefore, be sure the new database is running the InnoDB storage engine, with the proper settings for innodb_file_format and innodb_file_per_table, if you want to have the tables re-created as they exist in the original database. Typically, when the mysqldump file is loaded, MySQL and InnoDB ignore CREATE TABLE options they do not recognize, and the table(s) are created in a format used by the running server.

WARNING: If you use MySQL replication, ensure all slaves are configured with the InnoDB storage engine, with the same settings for innodb_file_format and innodb_file_per_table. If you do not do so, and you create tables that require the new Barracuda file format, replication errors may occur. If a slave MySQL server is running an older version of MySQL, it ignores the CREATE TABLE options to create a compressed table or one with ROW_FORMAT=DYNAMIC, and creates the table uncompressed, with ROW_FORMAT=COMPACT.

Oracle acknowledges that certain Third Party and Open Source software has been used to develop or is incorporated in the InnoDB storage engine. This appendix includes required third-party license information.

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COPYRIGHT OWNER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT,
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BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES;
LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER
CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT
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ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE
POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

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All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
are met:
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      notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
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      copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following
      disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials
      provided with the distribution.
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      contributors may be used to endorse or promote products
      derived from this software without specific prior written
      permission.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS
"AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT
LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS
FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
COPYRIGHT OWNER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT,
INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING,
BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES;
LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER
CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT
LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN
ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE
POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

Copyright (c) 2009, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
are met:
    * Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
      notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
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      copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following
      disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials
      provided with the distribution.
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      contributors may be used to endorse or promote products
      derived from this software without specific prior written
      permission.

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"AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT
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COPYRIGHT OWNER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT,
INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING,
BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES;
LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER
CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT
LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN
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POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

The ACID model is a set of database design principles that emphasize aspects of reliability that are important for business data and mission-critical applications. MySQL includes components such as the InnoDB storage engine that adhere closely to the ACID model, so that data is not corrupted and results are not distorted by exceptional conditions such as software crashes and hardware malfunctions. When you rely on ACID-compliant features, you do not need to reinvent the wheel of consistency checking and crash recovery mechanisms. In cases where you have additional software safeguards, ultra-reliable hardware, or an application that can tolerate a small amount of data loss or inconsistency, you can adjust MySQL settings to trade some of the ACID reliability for greater performance or throughput.

The following sections discuss how MySQL features, in particular the InnoDB storage engine, interact with the categories of the ACID model:

Atomicity

The atomicity aspect of the ACID model mainly involves InnoDB transactions. Related MySQL features include:

Consistency

The consistency aspect of the ACID model mainly involves internal InnoDB processing to protect data from crashes. Related MySQL features include:

Isolation

The isolation aspect of the ACID model mainly involves InnoDB transactions, in particular the isolation level that applies to each transaction. Related MySQL features include:

Durability

The durability aspect of the ACID model involves MySQL software features interacting with your particular hardware configuration. Because of the many possibilities depending on the capabilities of your CPU, network, and storage devices, this aspect is the most complicated to provide concrete guidelines for. (And those guidelines might take the form of buy “new hardware”.) Related MySQL features include:

To implement a large-scale, busy, or highly reliable database application, to port substantial code from a different database system, or to tune MySQL performance, you must understand the notions of transactions and locking as they relate to the InnoDB storage engine.

In the InnoDB transaction model, the goal is to combine the best properties of a multi-versioning database with traditional two-phase locking. InnoDB does locking on the row level and runs queries as nonlocking consistent reads by default, in the style of Oracle. The lock information in InnoDB is stored so space-efficiently that lock escalation is not needed: Typically, several users are permitted to lock every row in InnoDB tables, or any random subset of the rows, without causing InnoDB memory exhaustion.

In InnoDB, all user activity occurs inside a transaction. If autocommit mode is enabled, each SQL statement forms a single transaction on its own. By default, MySQL starts the session for each new connection with autocommit enabled, so MySQL does a commit after each SQL statement if that statement did not return an error. If a statement returns an error, the commit or rollback behavior depends on the error. See Section 14.20.4, “InnoDB Error Handling”.

A session that has autocommit enabled can perform a multiple-statement transaction by starting it with an explicit START TRANSACTION or BEGIN statement and ending it with a COMMIT or ROLLBACK statement. See Section 13.3.1, “START TRANSACTION, COMMIT, and ROLLBACK Syntax”.

If autocommit mode is disabled within a session with SET autocommit = 0, the session always has a transaction open. A COMMIT or ROLLBACK statement ends the current transaction and a new one starts.

A COMMIT means that the changes made in the current transaction are made permanent and become visible to other sessions. A ROLLBACK statement, on the other hand, cancels all modifications made by the current transaction. Both COMMIT and ROLLBACK release all InnoDB locks that were set during the current transaction.

In terms of the SQL:1992 transaction isolation levels, the default InnoDB level is REPEATABLE READ. InnoDB offers all four transaction isolation levels described by the SQL standard: READ UNCOMMITTED, READ COMMITTED, REPEATABLE READ, and SERIALIZABLE.

A user can change the isolation level for a single session or for all subsequent connections with the SET TRANSACTION statement. To set the server's default isolation level for all connections, use the --transaction-isolation option on the command line or in an option file. For detailed information about isolation levels and level-setting syntax, see Section 13.3.6, “SET TRANSACTION Syntax”.

In row-level locking, InnoDB normally uses next-key locking. That means that besides index records, InnoDB can also lock the gap preceding an index record to block insertions by other sessions where the indexed values would be inserted in that gap within the tree data structure. A next-key lock refers to a lock that locks an index record and the gap before it. A gap lock refers to a lock that locks only the gap before some index record.

For more information about row-level locking, and the circumstances under which gap locking is disabled, see Section 14.5.2.4, “InnoDB Record, Gap, and Next-Key Locks”.

mysql> CREATE TABLE t (i INT) ENGINE = InnoDB;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (1.07 sec)

mysql> INSERT INTO t (i) VALUES(1);
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.09 sec)

mysql> START TRANSACTION;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> SELECT * FROM t WHERE i = 1 LOCK IN SHARE MODE;
+------+
| i    |
+------+
|    1 |
+------+
1 row in set (0.10 sec)

mysql> START TRANSACTION;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> DELETE FROM t WHERE i = 1;

mysql> DELETE FROM t WHERE i = 1;
ERROR 1213 (40001): Deadlock found when trying to get lock;
try restarting transaction

ERROR 1213 (40001): Deadlock found when trying to get lock;
try restarting transaction

SELECT COUNT(c1) FROM t1 WHERE c1 = 'xyz'; -- Returns 0: no rows match.
DELETE FROM t1 WHERE c1 = 'xyz'; -- Deletes several rows recently committed by other transaction.

SELECT COUNT(c2) FROM t1 WHERE c2 = 'abc'; -- Returns 0: no rows match.
UPDATE t1 SET c2 = 'cba' WHERE c2 = 'abc'; -- Affects 10 rows: another txn just committed 10 rows with 'abc' values.
SELECT COUNT(c2) FROM t1 WHERE c2 = 'cba'; -- Returns 10: this txn can now see the rows it just updated.

             Session A              Session B

           SET autocommit=0;      SET autocommit=0;
time
|          SELECT * FROM t;
|          empty set
|                                 INSERT INTO t VALUES (1, 2);
|
v          SELECT * FROM t;
           empty set
                                  COMMIT;

           SELECT * FROM t;
           empty set

           COMMIT;

           SELECT * FROM t;
           ---------------------
           |    1    |    2    |
           ---------------------
           1 row in set

SELECT * FROM t LOCK IN SHARE MODE;

SELECT * FROM parent WHERE NAME = 'Jones' LOCK IN SHARE MODE;

SELECT counter_field FROM child_codes FOR UPDATE;
UPDATE child_codes SET counter_field = counter_field + 1;

UPDATE child_codes SET counter_field = LAST_INSERT_ID(counter_field + 1);
SELECT LAST_INSERT_ID();

(negative infinity, 10]
(10, 11]
(11, 13]
(13, 20]
(20, positive infinity)

SELECT * FROM child WHERE id = 100;

SELECT * FROM child WHERE id > 100 FOR UPDATE;

InnoDB is a multi-versioned storage engine: it keeps information about old versions of changed rows, to support transactional features such as concurrency and rollback. This information is stored in the tablespace in a data structure called a rollback segment (after an analogous data structure in Oracle). InnoDB uses the information in the rollback segment to perform the undo operations needed in a transaction rollback. It also uses the information to build earlier versions of a row for a consistent read.

Internally, InnoDB adds three fields to each row stored in the database. A 6-byte DB_TRX_ID field indicates the transaction identifier for the last transaction that inserted or updated the row. Also, a deletion is treated internally as an update where a special bit in the row is set to mark it as deleted. Each row also contains a 7-byte DB_ROLL_PTR field called the roll pointer. The roll pointer points to an undo log record written to the rollback segment. If the row was updated, the undo log record contains the information necessary to rebuild the content of the row before it was updated. A 6-byte DB_ROW_ID field contains a row ID that increases monotonically as new rows are inserted. If InnoDB generates a clustered index automatically, the index contains row ID values. Otherwise, the DB_ROW_ID column does not appear in any index.

Undo logs in the rollback segment are divided into insert and update undo logs. Insert undo logs are needed only in transaction rollback and can be discarded as soon as the transaction commits. Update undo logs are used also in consistent reads, but they can be discarded only after there is no transaction present for which InnoDB has assigned a snapshot that in a consistent read could need the information in the update undo log to build an earlier version of a database row.

Commit your transactions regularly, including those transactions that issue only consistent reads. Otherwise, InnoDB cannot discard data from the update undo logs, and the rollback segment may grow too big, filling up your tablespace.

The physical size of an undo log record in the rollback segment is typically smaller than the corresponding inserted or updated row. You can use this information to calculate the space needed for your rollback segment.

In the InnoDB multi-versioning scheme, a row is not physically removed from the database immediately when you delete it with an SQL statement. InnoDB only physically removes the corresponding row and its index records when it discards the update undo log record written for the deletion. This removal operation is called a purge, and it is quite fast, usually taking the same order of time as the SQL statement that did the deletion.

If you insert and delete rows in smallish batches at about the same rate in the table, the purge thread can start to lag behind and the table can grow bigger and bigger because of all the “dead” rows, making everything disk-bound and very slow. In such a case, throttle new row operations, and allocate more resources to the purge thread by tuning the innodb_max_purge_lag system variable. See Section 14.14, “InnoDB Startup Options and System Variables” for more information.

The redo log is a disk-based data structure used during crash recovery to correct data written by incomplete transactions. During normal operations, the redo log encodes requests to change InnoDB table data, which result from SQL statements or low-level API calls. Modifications that did not finish updating the data files before an unexpected shutdown are replayed automatically during initialization, and before the connections are accepted. For information about the role of the redo log in crash recovery, see Section 14.18.1, “The InnoDB Recovery Process”.

By default, the redo log is physically represented on disk as a set of files, named ib_logfile0 and ib_logfile1. MySQL writes to the redo log files in a circular fashion. Data in the redo log is encoded in terms of records affected; this data is collectively referred to as redo. The passage of data through the redo log is represented by an ever-increasing LSN value.

Disk layout for the redo log is configured using the following options:

To change your initial redo log configuration, refer to Section 14.7.2, “Changing the Number or Size of InnoDB Redo Log Files”. For information about optimizing redo logging, see Section 8.5.3, “Optimizing InnoDB Redo Logging”.

A rollback segment is a storage area that holds copies of data modified by active transactions. If another transaction needs to see the original data (as part of a consistent read operation), the unmodified data is retrieved from this storage area, which is physically part of the system tablespace. For more information about rollback segments and multi-versioning, see Section 14.5.3, “InnoDB Multi-Versioning”.

Prior to MySQL 5.5.4, InnoDB supported a single rollback segment which supported a maximum of 1023 concurrent data-modifying transactions (read-only transactions do not count against the maximum limit). In MySQL 5.5.4 the single rollback segment was divided into 128 rollback segments, each supporting up to 1023 concurrent data-modifying transactions, creating a new limit of approximately 128K concurrent data-modifying transactions. The innodb_rollback_segments option defines how many of the rollback segments in the system tablespace are used for InnoDB transactions.

Each transaction is assigned to one of the rollback segments, and remains tied to that rollback segment for the duration. The increased limit for concurrent data-modifying transactions improves both scalability (higher number of concurrent transactions) and performance (less contention when different transactions access the rollback segments).

In MySQL and InnoDB, multiple threads of execution access shared data structures. InnoDB synchronizes these accesses with its own implementation of mutexes and read/write locks. Historically, InnoDB protected the internal state of a read/write lock with an InnoDB mutex, and the the internal state of an InnoDB mutex was protected by a Pthreads mutex, as in IEEE Std 1003.1c (POSIX.1c).

On many platforms, Atomic operations can often be used to synchronize the actions of multiple threads more efficiently than Pthreads. Each operation to acquire or release a lock can be done in fewer CPU instructions, wasting less time when threads contend for access to shared data structures. This in turn means greater scalability on multi-core platforms.

On platforms that support Atomic operations, InnoDB now implements mutexes and read/write locks with the built-in functions provided by the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for atomic memory access instead of using the Pthreads approach. More specifically, InnoDB compiled with GCC version 4.1.2 or later uses the atomic builtins instead of a pthread_mutex_t to implement InnoDB mutexes and read/write locks.

On 32-bit Microsoft Windows, InnoDB implements mutexes (but not read/write locks) with hand-written assembler instructions. Beginning with Microsoft Windows 2000, functions for Interlocked Variable Access are available that are similar to the built-in functions provided by GCC. On Windows 2000 and higher, InnoDB makes use of the Interlocked functions, which support read/write locks and 64-bit platforms.

Solaris 10 introduced library functions for atomic operations, and InnoDB uses these functions by default. When MySQL is compiled on Solaris 10 or later with a compiler that does not support the built-in functions provided by the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for atomic memory access, InnoDB uses the library functions.

On platforms where the GCC, Windows, or Solaris functions for atomic memory access are not available, InnoDB uses the traditional Pthreads method of implementing mutexes and read/write locks.

When MySQL starts, InnoDB writes a message to the log file indicating whether atomic memory access is used for mutexes, for mutexes and read/write locks, or neither. If suitable tools are used to build InnoDB and the target CPU supports the atomic operations required, InnoDB uses the built-in functions for mutexing. If, in addition, the compare-and-swap operation can be used on thread identifiers (pthread_t), then InnoDB uses the instructions for read-write locks as well.

If you are building from source, ensure that the build process properly takes advantage of your platform capabilities.

For more information about the performance implications of locking, see Section 8.11, “Optimizing Locking Operations”.

The first decisions to make about InnoDB configuration involve how to lay out InnoDB data files, and how much memory to allocate for the InnoDB storage engine. You record these choices either by recording them in a configuration file that MySQL reads at startup, or by specifying them as command-line options in a startup script. The full list of options, descriptions, and allowed parameter values is at Section 14.14, “InnoDB Startup Options and System Variables”.

Overview of InnoDB Tablespace and Log Files

Two important disk-based resources managed by the InnoDB storage engine are its tablespace data files and its log files. If you specify no InnoDB configuration options, MySQL creates an auto-extending data file, slightly larger than 10MB, named ibdata1 and two log files named ib_logfile0 and ib_logfile1 in the MySQL data directory. Their size is given by the size of the innodb_log_file_size system variable. To get good performance, explicitly provide InnoDB parameters as discussed in the following examples. Naturally, edit the settings to suit your hardware and requirements.

The examples shown here are representative. See Section 14.14, “InnoDB Startup Options and System Variables” for additional information about InnoDB-related configuration parameters.

Considerations for Storage Devices

In some cases, database performance improves if the data is not all placed on the same physical disk. Putting log files on a different disk from data is very often beneficial for performance. The example illustrates how to do this. It places the two data files on different disks and places the log files on the third disk. InnoDB fills the tablespace beginning with the first data file. You can also use raw disk partitions (raw devices) as InnoDB data files, which may speed up I/O. See Section 14.7.3, “Using Raw Disk Partitions for the System Tablespace”.

Specifying the Location and Size for InnoDB Tablespace Files

To set up the InnoDB tablespace files, use the innodb_data_file_path option in the [mysqld] section of the my.cnf option file. On Windows, you can use my.ini instead. The value of innodb_data_file_path should be a list of one or more data file specifications. If you name more than one data file, separate them by semicolon (“;”) characters:

innodb_data_file_path=datafile_spec1[;datafile_spec2]...

For example, the following setting explicitly creates a minimally sized system tablespace:

[mysqld]
innodb_data_file_path=ibdata1:12M:autoextend

This setting configures a single data file, slightly larger than 10MB, named ibdata1 that is auto-extending. No location for the file is given, so by default, InnoDB creates it in the MySQL data directory.

Sizes are specified using K, M, or G suffix letters to indicate units of KB, MB, or GB.

A tablespace containing a fixed-size 50MB data file named ibdata1 and a 50MB auto-extending file named ibdata2 in the data directory can be configured like this:

[mysqld]
innodb_data_file_path=ibdata1:50M;ibdata2:50M:autoextend

The full syntax for a data file specification includes the file name, its size, and several optional attributes:

file_name:file_size[:autoextend[:max:max_file_size]]

The autoextend and max attributes can be used only for the last data file in the innodb_data_file_path line.

If you specify the autoextend option for the last data file, InnoDB extends the data file if it runs out of free space in the tablespace. The increment is 8MB at a time by default. To modify the increment, change the innodb_autoextend_increment system variable.

If the disk becomes full, you might want to add another data file on another disk. For tablespace reconfiguration instructions, see Section 14.7.1, “Resizing the InnoDB System Tablespace”.

InnoDB is not aware of the file system maximum file size, so be cautious on file systems where the maximum file size is a small value such as 2GB. To specify a maximum size for an auto-extending data file, use the max attribute following the autoextend attribute. Use the max attribute only in cases where constraining disk usage is of critical importance, because exceeding the maximum size causes a fatal error, possibly including a crash. The following configuration permits ibdata1 to grow up to a limit of 500MB:

[mysqld]
innodb_data_file_path=ibdata1:12M:autoextend:max:500M

InnoDB creates tablespace files in the MySQL data directory by default. To specify a location explicitly, use the innodb_data_home_dir option. For example, to use two files named ibdata1 and ibdata2 but create them in the /ibdata directory, configure InnoDB like this:

[mysqld]
innodb_data_home_dir = /ibdata
innodb_data_file_path=ibdata1:50M;ibdata2:50M:autoextend

InnoDB forms the directory path for each data file by textually concatenating the value of innodb_data_home_dir to the data file name, adding a path name separator (slash or backslash) between values if necessary. If the innodb_data_home_dir option is not specified in my.cnf at all, the default value is the “dot” directory ./, which means the MySQL data directory. (The MySQL server changes its current working directory to its data directory when it begins executing.)

If you specify innodb_data_home_dir as an empty string, you can specify absolute paths for the data files listed in the innodb_data_file_path value. The following example is equivalent to the preceding one:

[mysqld]
innodb_data_home_dir =
innodb_data_file_path=/ibdata/ibdata1:50M;/ibdata/ibdata2:50M:autoextend

Specifying InnoDB Configuration Options

Sample my.cnf file for small systems. Suppose that you have a computer with 512MB RAM and one hard disk. The following example shows possible configuration parameters in my.cnf or my.ini for InnoDB, including the autoextend attribute. The example suits most users, both on Unix and Windows, who do not want to distribute InnoDB data files and log files onto several disks. It creates an auto-extending data file ibdata1 and two InnoDB log files ib_logfile0 and ib_logfile1 in the MySQL data directory.

[mysqld]
# You can write your other MySQL server options here
# ...
# Data files must be able to hold your data and indexes.
# Make sure that you have enough free disk space.
innodb_data_file_path = ibdata1:12M:autoextend
#
# Set buffer pool size to 50-80% of your computer's memory
innodb_buffer_pool_size=256M
innodb_additional_mem_pool_size=20M
#
# Set the log file size to about 25% of the buffer pool size
innodb_log_file_size=64M
innodb_log_buffer_size=8M
#
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=1

Note that data files must be less than 2GB in some file systems. The combined size of the log files must be less than 4GB. The combined size of data files must be at least slightly larger than 10MB.

Setting Up the InnoDB System Tablespace

When you create an InnoDB system tablespace for the first time, it is best that you start the MySQL server from the command prompt. InnoDB then prints the information about the database creation to the screen, so you can see what is happening. For example, on Windows, if mysqld is located in C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.5\bin, you can start it like this:

C:\> "C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.5\bin\mysqld" --console

If you do not send server output to the screen, check the server's error log to see what InnoDB prints during the startup process.

Editing the MySQL Configuration File

You can place InnoDB options in the [mysqld] group of any option file that your server reads when it starts. The locations for option files are described in Section 4.2.6, “Using Option Files”.

If you installed MySQL on Windows using the installation and configuration wizards, the option file will be the my.ini file located in your MySQL installation directory. See Section 2.3.3, “Installing MySQL on Microsoft Windows Using MySQL Installer”.

If your PC uses a boot loader where the C: drive is not the boot drive, your only option is to use the my.ini file in your Windows directory (typically C:\WINDOWS). You can use the SET command at the command prompt in a console window to print the value of WINDIR:

C:\> SET WINDIR
windir=C:\WINDOWS

To make sure that mysqld reads options only from a specific file, use the --defaults-file option as the first option on the command line when starting the server:

mysqld --defaults-file=your_path_to_my_cnf

Sample my.cnf file for large systems. Suppose that you have a Linux computer with 2GB RAM and three 60GB hard disks at directory paths /, /dr2 and /dr3. The following example shows possible configuration parameters in my.cnf for InnoDB.

[mysqld]
# You can write your other MySQL server options here
# ...
innodb_data_home_dir =
#
# Data files must be able to hold your data and indexes
innodb_data_file_path = /db/ibdata1:2000M;/dr2/db/ibdata2:2000M:autoextend
#
# Set buffer pool size to 50-80% of your computer's memory,
# but make sure on Linux x86 total memory usage is < 2GB
innodb_buffer_pool_size=1G
innodb_additional_mem_pool_size=20M
innodb_log_group_home_dir = /dr3/iblogs
#
# Set the log file size to about 25% of the buffer pool size
innodb_log_file_size=250M
innodb_log_buffer_size=8M
#
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=1
innodb_lock_wait_timeout=50
#
# Uncomment the next line if you want to use it
#innodb_thread_concurrency=5

Determining the Maximum Memory Allocation for InnoDB

innodb_buffer_pool_size
+ key_buffer_size
+ max_connections*(sort_buffer_size+read_buffer_size+binlog_cache_size)
+ max_connections*2MB

Tuning other mysqld server parameters. The following values are typical and suit most users:

[mysqld]
skip-external-locking
max_connections=200
read_buffer_size=1M
sort_buffer_size=1M
#
# Set key_buffer to 5 - 50% of your RAM depending on how much
# you use MyISAM tables, but keep key_buffer_size + InnoDB
# buffer pool size < 80% of your RAM
key_buffer_size=value

On Linux, if the kernel is enabled for large page support, InnoDB can use large pages to allocate memory for its buffer pool and additional memory pool. See Section 8.12.5.2, “Enabling Large Page Support”.

Turning Off InnoDB

Oracle recommends InnoDB as the preferred storage engine for typical database applications, from single-user wikis and blogs running on a local system, to high-end applications pushing the limits of performance. In MySQL 5.5, InnoDB is the default storage engine for new tables.

If you do not want to use InnoDB tables, start the server with the --innodb=OFF or --skip-innodb option to disable the InnoDB storage engine. In this case, because the default storage engine is InnoDB, the server will not start unless you also use --default-storage-engine to set the default to some other engine.

This section provides performance related configuration information for the InnoDB buffer pool. For additional information, see Section 8.10.1, “The InnoDB Buffer Pool”.

Total memory allocated 1107296256; in additional pool allocated 0
Dictionary memory allocated 80360
Buffer pool size   65535
Free buffers       0
Database pages     63920
Old database pages 23600
Modified db pages  34969
Pending reads 32
Pending writes: LRU 0, flush list 0, single page 0
Pages made young 414946, not young 2930673
1274.75 youngs/s, 16521.90 non-youngs/s
Pages read 486005, created 3178, written 160585
2132.37 reads/s, 3.40 creates/s, 323.74 writes/s
Buffer pool hit rate 950 / 1000, young-making rate 30 / 1000 not 392 / 1000
Pages read ahead 1510.10/s, evicted without access 0.00/s
LRU len: 63920, unzip_LRU len: 0
I/O sum[43690]:cur[221], unzip sum[0]:cur[0]

When InnoDB was developed, the memory allocators supplied with operating systems and run-time libraries were often lacking in performance and scalability. At that time, there were no memory allocator libraries tuned for multi-core CPUs. Therefore, InnoDB implemented its own memory allocator in the mem subsystem. This allocator is guarded by a single mutex, which may become a bottleneck. InnoDB also implements a wrapper interface around the system allocator (malloc and free) that is likewise guarded by a single mutex.

Today, as multi-core systems have become more widely available, and as operating systems have matured, significant improvements have been made in the memory allocators provided with operating systems. New memory allocators perform better and are more scalable than they were in the past. The leading high-performance memory allocators include Hoard, libumem, mtmalloc, ptmalloc, tbbmalloc, and TCMalloc. Most workloads, especially those where memory is frequently allocated and released (such as multi-table joins), benefit from using a more highly tuned memory allocator as opposed to the internal, InnoDB-specific memory allocator.

You can control whether InnoDB uses its own memory allocator or an allocator of the operating system, by setting the value of the system configuration parameter innodb_use_sys_malloc in the MySQL option file (my.cnf or my.ini). If set to ON or 1 (the default), InnoDB uses the malloc and free functions of the underlying system rather than manage memory pools itself. This parameter is not dynamic, and takes effect only when the system is started. To continue to use the InnoDB memory allocator, set innodb_use_sys_malloc to 0.

For more information about the performance implications of InnoDB memory usage, see Section 8.10, “Buffering and Caching”.

When INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE operations are performed on a table, the values of indexed columns (particularly the values of secondary keys) are often in an unsorted order, requiring substantial I/O to bring secondary indexes up to date. InnoDB has a change buffer that caches changes to secondary index entries when the relevant page is not in the buffer pool, thus avoiding expensive I/O operations by not immediately reading in the page from disk. The buffered changes are merged when the page is loaded to the buffer pool, and the updated page is later flushed to disk. The InnoDB main thread merges buffered changes when the server is nearly idle, and during a slow shutdown.

Because it can result in fewer disk reads and writes, the change buffer feature is most valuable for workloads that are I/O-bound, for example applications with a high volume of DML operations such as bulk inserts.

However, the change buffer occupies a part of the buffer pool, reducing the memory available to cache data pages. If the working set almost fits in the buffer pool, or if your tables have relatively few secondary indexes, it may be useful to disable change buffering. If the working set fits entirely within the buffer, change buffering does not impose extra overhead, because it only applies to pages that are not in the buffer pool.

You can control the extent to which InnoDB performs change buffering using the innodb_change_buffering configuration parameter. You can enable or disable buffering for inserts, delete operations (when index records are initially marked for deletion) and purge operations (when index records are physically deleted). An update operation is a combination of an insert and a delete. In MySQL 5.5 and higher, the default innodb_change_buffering value is changed from inserts to all.

Permitted innodb_change_buffering values include:

You can set the innodb_change_buffering parameter in the MySQL option file (my.cnf or my.ini) or change it dynamically with the SET GLOBAL command, which requires the SUPER privilege. Changing the setting affects the buffering of new operations; the merging of existing buffered entries is not affected.

For related information, see Section 14.5.6.4, “Change Buffer”.

InnoDB uses operating system threads to process requests from user transactions. (Transactions may issue many requests to InnoDB before they commit or roll back.) On modern operating systems and servers with multi-core processors, where context switching is efficient, most workloads run well without any limit on the number of concurrent threads. Scalability improvements in MySQL 5.5 and up reduce the need to limit the number of concurrently executing threads inside InnoDB.

In situations where it is helpful to minimize context switching between threads, InnoDB can use a number of techniques to limit the number of concurrently executing operating system threads (and thus the number of requests that are processed at any one time). When InnoDB receives a new request from a user session, if the number of threads concurrently executing is at a pre-defined limit, the new request sleeps for a short time before it tries again. A request that cannot be rescheduled after the sleep is put in a first-in/first-out queue and eventually is processed. Threads waiting for locks are not counted in the number of concurrently executing threads.

You can limit the number of concurrent threads by setting the configuration parameter innodb_thread_concurrency. Once the number of executing threads reaches this limit, additional threads sleep for a number of microseconds, set by the configuration parameter innodb_thread_sleep_delay, before being placed into the queue.

The default value for innodb_thread_concurrency and the implied default limit on the number of concurrent threads has been changed in various releases of MySQL and InnoDB. Currently, the default value of innodb_thread_concurrency is 0, so that by default there is no limit on the number of concurrently executing threads, as shown in Table 14.2, “Changes to innodb_thread_concurrency”.

Note that InnoDB causes threads to sleep only when the number of concurrent threads is limited. When there is no limit on the number of threads, all contend equally to be scheduled. That is, if innodb_thread_concurrency is 0, the value of innodb_thread_sleep_delay is ignored.

When there is a limit on the number of threads (when innodb_thread_concurrency is > 0), InnoDB reduces context switching overhead by permitting multiple requests made during the execution of a single SQL statement to enter InnoDB without observing the limit set by innodb_thread_concurrency. Since an SQL statement (such as a join) may comprise multiple row operations within InnoDB, InnoDB assigns a specified number of “tickets” that allow a thread to be scheduled repeatedly with minimal overhead.

When a new SQL statement starts, a thread has no tickets, and it must observe innodb_thread_concurrency. Once the thread is entitled to enter InnoDB, it is assigned a number of tickets that it can use for subsequently entering InnoDB to perform row operations. If the tickets run out, the thread is evicted, and innodb_thread_concurrency is observed again which may place the thread back into the first-in/first-out queue of waiting threads. When the thread is once again entitled to enter InnoDB, tickets are assigned again. The number of tickets assigned is specified by the global option innodb_concurrency_tickets, which is 500 by default. A thread that is waiting for a lock is given one ticket once the lock becomes available.

The correct values of these variables depend on your environment and workload. Try a range of different values to determine what value works for your applications. Before limiting the number of concurrently executing threads, review configuration options that may improve the performance of InnoDB on multi-core and multi-processor computers, such as innodb_use_sys_malloc and innodb_adaptive_hash_index.

For general performance information about MySQL thread handling, see Section 8.12.6.1, “How MySQL Uses Threads for Client Connections”.

InnoDB uses background threads to service various types of I/O requests. You can configure the number of background threads that service read and write I/O on data pages, using the configuration parameters innodb_read_io_threads and innodb_write_io_threads. These parameters signify the number of background threads used for read and write requests respectively. They are effective on all supported platforms. You can set the value of these parameters in the MySQL option file (my.cnf or my.ini); you cannot change them dynamically. The default value for these parameters is 4 and the permissible values range from 1-64.

These parameters replace innodb_file_io_threads from earlier versions of MySQL. If you try to set a value for this obsolete parameter, a warning is written to the log file and the value is ignored. This parameter only applied to Windows platforms. (On non-Windows platforms, there was only one thread each for read and write.)

The purpose of this change is to make InnoDB more scalable on high end systems. Each background thread can handle up to 256 pending I/O requests. A major source of background I/O is the read-ahead requests. InnoDB tries to balance the load of incoming requests in such way that most of the background threads share work equally. InnoDB also attempts to allocate read requests from the same extent to the same thread to increase the chances of coalescing the requests together. If you have a high end I/O subsystem and you see more than 64 × innodb_read_io_threads pending read requests in SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS, you might gain by increasing the value of innodb_read_io_threads.

For more information about InnoDB I/O performance, see Section 8.5.7, “Optimizing InnoDB Disk I/O”.

The master thread in InnoDB is a thread that performs various tasks in the background. Most of these tasks are I/O related, such as flushing dirty pages from the buffer pool or writing changes from the insert buffer to the appropriate secondary indexes. The master thread attempts to perform these tasks in a way that does not adversely affect the normal working of the server. It tries to estimate the free I/O bandwidth available and tune its activities to take advantage of this free capacity. Historically, InnoDB has used a hard coded value of 100 IOPs (input/output operations per second) as the total I/O capacity of the server.

The parameter innodb_io_capacity indicates the overall I/O capacity available to InnoDB. This parameter should be set to approximately the number of I/O operations that the system can perform per second. The value depends on your system configuration. When innodb_io_capacity is set, the master threads estimates the I/O bandwidth available for background tasks based on the set value. Setting the value to 100 reverts to the old behavior.

You can set the value of innodb_io_capacity to any number 100 or greater. The default value is 200, reflecting that the performance of typical modern I/O devices is higher than in the early days of MySQL. Typically, values around the previous default of 100 are appropriate for consumer-level storage devices, such as hard drives up to 7200 RPMs. Faster hard drives, RAID configurations, and SSDs benefit from higher values.

The innodb_io_capacity setting is a total limit for all buffer pool instances. When dirty pages are flushed, the innodb_io_capacity limit is divided equally among buffer pool instances. For more information, see the innodb_io_capacity system variable description.

You can set the value of this parameter in the MySQL option file (my.cnf or my.ini) or change it dynamically with the SET GLOBAL command, which requires the SUPER privilege.

For more information about InnoDB I/O performance, see Section 8.5.7, “Optimizing InnoDB Disk I/O”.

Many InnoDB mutexes and rw-locks are reserved for a short time. On a multi-core system, it can be more efficient for a thread to continuously check if it can acquire a mutex or rw-lock for a while before sleeping. If the mutex or rw-lock becomes available during this polling period, the thread can continue immediately, in the same time slice. However, too-frequent polling by multiple threads of a shared object can cause “cache ping pong”, different processors invalidating portions of each others' cache. InnoDB minimizes this issue by waiting a random time between subsequent polls. The delay is implemented as a busy loop.

You can control the maximum delay between testing a mutex or rw-lock using the parameter innodb_spin_wait_delay. The duration of the delay loop depends on the C compiler and the target processor. (In the 100MHz Pentium era, the unit of delay was one microsecond.) On a system where all processor cores share a fast cache memory, you might reduce the maximum delay or disable the busy loop altogether by setting innodb_spin_wait_delay=0. On a system with multiple processor chips, the effect of cache invalidation can be more significant and you might increase the maximum delay.

The default value of innodb_spin_wait_delay is 6. The spin wait delay is a dynamic global parameter that you can specify in the MySQL option file (my.cnf or my.ini) or change at runtime with the command SET GLOBAL innodb_spin_wait_delay=delay, where delay is the desired maximum delay. Changing the setting requires the SUPER privilege.

For performance considerations for InnoDB locking operations, see Section 8.11, “Optimizing Locking Operations”.

Starting in InnoDB 1.1 with MySQL 5.5, the purge operations (a type of garbage collection) that InnoDB performs automatically can be done in a separate thread, rather than as part of the master thread. This change improves scalability, because the main database operations run independently from maintenance work happening in the background.

To enable this feature, set the configuration option innodb_purge_threads to 1, as opposed to the default of 0, which combines the purge operation into the master thread.

You might not notice a significant speedup, because the purge thread might encounter new types of contention; the single purge thread really lays the groundwork for further tuning and possibly multiple purge threads in the future. There is another new configuration option, innodb_purge_batch_size with a default value of 20 and maximum value of 5000. This option is mainly intended for experimentation and tuning of purge operations, and should not be interesting to typical users.

For more information about InnoDB I/O performance, see Section 8.5.7, “Optimizing InnoDB Disk I/O”.

The MySQL query optimizer uses estimated statistics about key distributions to choose the indexes for an execution plan, based on the relative selectivity of the index. Certain operations cause InnoDB to sample random pages from each index on a table to estimate the cardinality of the index. (This technique is known as random dives.) These operations include the ANALYZE TABLE statement, the SHOW TABLE STATUS statement, and accessing the table for the first time after a restart.

To give you control over the quality of the statistics estimate (and thus better information for the query optimizer), you can now change the number of sampled pages using the parameter innodb_stats_sample_pages. Previously, the number of sampled pages was always 8, which could be insufficient to produce an accurate estimate, leading to poor index choices by the query optimizer. This technique is especially important for large tables and tables used in joins. Unnecessary full table scans for such tables can be a substantial performance issue.

You can set the global parameter innodb_stats_sample_pages, at runtime. The default value for this parameter is 8, preserving the same behavior as in past releases.

To disable the cardinality estimation for metadata statements such as SHOW TABLE STATUS or SHOW INDEX, or when accessing the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES or INFORMATION_SCHEMA.STATISTICS tables, execute the statement SET GLOBAL innodb_stats_on_metadata=OFF (or 0). The ability to set this option dynamically is also relatively new.

All InnoDB tables are opened, and the statistics are re-estimated for all associated indexes, when the mysql client starts with the --auto-rehash setting on (the default). To improve the start up time of the mysql client, you can turn auto-rehash off using the --disable-auto-rehash option. The auto-rehash feature enables automatic name completion of database, table, and column names for interactive users.

Whatever value of innodb_stats_sample_pages works best for a system, set the option and leave it at that value. Choose a value that results in reasonably accurate estimates for all tables in your database without requiring excessive I/O. Because the statistics are automatically recalculated at various times other than on execution of ANALYZE TABLE, it does not make sense to increase the index sample size, run ANALYZE TABLE, then decrease sample size again. The more accurate statistics calculated by ANALYZE running with a high value of innodb_stats_sample_pages can be wiped away later.

Although it is not possible to specify the sample size on a per-table basis, smaller tables generally require fewer index samples than larger tables do. If your database has many large tables, consider using a higher value for innodb_stats_sample_pages than if you have mostly smaller tables.

This section describes how to increase or decrease the size of the InnoDB system tablespace.

Increasing the Size of the InnoDB System Tablespace

The easiest way to increase the size of the InnoDB system tablespace is to configure it from the beginning to be auto-extending. Specify the autoextend attribute for the last data file in the tablespace definition. Then InnoDB increases the size of that file automatically in 8MB increments when it runs out of space. The increment size can be changed by setting the value of the innodb_autoextend_increment system variable, which is measured in megabytes.

You can expand the system tablespace by a defined amount by adding another data file:

For example, this tablespace has just one auto-extending data file ibdata1:

innodb_data_home_dir =
innodb_data_file_path = /ibdata/ibdata1:10M:autoextend

Suppose that this data file, over time, has grown to 988MB. Here is the configuration line after modifying the original data file to use a fixed size and adding a new auto-extending data file:

innodb_data_home_dir =
innodb_data_file_path = /ibdata/ibdata1:988M;/disk2/ibdata2:50M:autoextend

When you add a new data file to the system tablespace configuration, make sure that the filename does not refer to an existing file. InnoDB creates and initializes the file when you restart the server.

Decreasing the Size of the InnoDB System Tablespace

Currently, you cannot remove a data file from the system tablespace. To decrease the system tablespace size, use this procedure:

To change the number or the size of your InnoDB redo log files, perform the following steps:

You can use raw disk partitions as data files in the InnoDB system tablespace. This technique enables nonbuffered I/O on Windows and on some Linux and Unix systems without file system overhead. Perform tests with and without raw partitions to verify whether this change actually improves performance on your system.

When you use a raw disk partition, ensure that the user ID that runs the MySQL server has read and write privileges for that partition. For example, if you run the server as the mysql user, the partition must be readable and writeable by mysql. If you run the server with the --memlock option, the server must be run as root, so the partition must be readable and writeable by root.

The procedures described below involve option file modification. For additional information, see Section 4.2.6, “Using Option Files”.

Allocating a Raw Disk Partition on Linux and Unix Systems

Allocating a Raw Disk Partition on Windows

On Windows systems, the same steps and accompanying guidelines described for Linux and Unix systems apply except that the innodb_data_file_path setting differs slightly on Windows.

By default, all InnoDB tables and indexes are stored in the system tablespace. As an alternative, you can store each InnoDB table and associated indexes in its own data file. This feature is called “file-per-table tablespaces” because each table has its own tablespace, and each tablespace has its own .ibd data file. This feature is controlled by the innodb_file_per_table configuration option.

Advantages of File-Per-Table Tablespaces

Potential Disadvantages of File-Per-Table Tablespaces

Enabling and Disabling File-Per-Table Tablespaces

To enable file-per-table tablespaces, start the server with the --innodb_file_per_table option. For example, add a line to the [mysqld] section of my.cnf:

[mysqld]
innodb_file_per_table=1

With innodb_file_per_table enabled, InnoDB stores each newly created table into its own tbl_name.ibd file in the database directory where the table belongs. This is similar to what the MyISAM storage engine does, but MyISAM divides the table into a tbl_name.MYD data file and an tbl_name.MYI index file. For InnoDB, the data and the indexes are stored together in the .ibd file. The tbl_name.frm file is still created as usual.

If you remove the innodb_file_per_table line from my.cnf and restart the server, newly created InnoDB tables are created inside the shared tablespace files again.

To move a table from the system tablespace to its own tablespace, change the innodb_file_per_table setting and rebuild the table:

SET GLOBAL innodb_file_per_table=1;
ALTER TABLE table_name ENGINE=InnoDB;

Portability Considerations for .ibd Files

You cannot freely move .ibd files between database directories as you can with MyISAM table files. The table definition stored in the InnoDB shared tablespace includes the database name. The transaction IDs and log sequence numbers stored in the tablespace files also differ between databases.

To move an .ibd file and the associated table from one database to another, use a RENAME TABLE statement:

RENAME TABLE db1.tbl_name TO db2.tbl_name;

If you have a “clean” backup of an .ibd file, you can restore it to the MySQL installation from which it originated as follows:

In this context, a “clean” .ibd file backup is one for which the following requirements are satisfied:

You can make a clean backup .ibd file using the following method:

Another method for making a clean copy of an .ibd file is to use the MySQL Enterprise Backup product:

[mysqld]
innodb_file_per_table

SET GLOBAL innodb_file_per_table=1;

SET GLOBAL innodb_file_per_table=1;
ALTER TABLE table_name ENGINE=InnoDB;

To create an InnoDB table, specify an ENGINE=InnoDB option in the CREATE TABLE statement:

CREATE TABLE t1 (a INT, b CHAR (20), PRIMARY KEY (a)) ENGINE=InnoDB;

An InnoDB table and its indexes can be created in the system tablespace or in a file-per-table tablespace. When innodb_file_per_table is enabled, an InnoDB table is implicitly created in an individual file-per-table tablespace. Conversely, when innodb_file_per_table is disabled, an InnoDB table is implicitly created in the system tablespace.

When you create an InnoDB table, MySQL creates a .frm file in a database directory under the MySQL data directory. For a table created in a file-per-table tablespace, an .ibd file is also created. A table created in the system tablespace is created in the existing system tablespace ibdata files.

Internally, InnoDB adds an entry for each table to the InnoDB data dictionary. The entry includes the database name. For example, if table t1 is created in the test database, the data dictionary entry is 'test/t1'. This means you can create a table of the same name (t1) in a different database, and the table names do not collide inside InnoDB.

Viewing the Properties of InnoDB Tables

To view the properties of InnoDB tables, issue a SHOW TABLE STATUS statement:

mysql> SHOW TABLE STATUS FROM test LIKE 't%' \G;
*************************** 1. row ***************************
           Name: t1
         Engine: InnoDB
        Version: 10
     Row_format: Compact
           Rows: 0
 Avg_row_length: 0
    Data_length: 16384
Max_data_length: 0
   Index_length: 0
      Data_free: 41943040
 Auto_increment: NULL
    Create_time: 2015-03-16 16:42:17
    Update_time: NULL
     Check_time: NULL
      Collation: latin1_swedish_ci
       Checksum: NULL
 Create_options: 
        Comment: 
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

In the status output, you see the Row format property of table t1 is Compact. Although that setting is fine for basic experimentation, consider using the Dynamic or Compressed row format to take advantage of InnoDB features such as table compression and off-page storage for long column values. Using these row formats requires that innodb_file_per_table is enabled and that innodb_file_format is set to Barracuda:

SET GLOBAL innodb_file_per_table=1;
SET GLOBAL innodb_file_format=barracuda;
CREATE TABLE t3 (a INT, b CHAR (20), PRIMARY KEY (a)) ROW_FORMAT=DYNAMIC;
CREATE TABLE t4 (a INT, b CHAR (20), PRIMARY KEY (a)) ROW_FORMAT=COMPRESSED;

Defining a Primary Key for InnoDB Tables

Always set up a primary key for each InnoDB table, specifying the column or columns that:

For example, in a table containing information about people, you would not create a primary key on (firstname, lastname) because more than one person can have the same name, some people have blank last names, and sometimes people change their names. With so many constraints, often there is not an obvious set of columns to use as a primary key, so you create a new column with a numeric ID to serve as all or part of the primary key. You can declare an auto-increment column so that ascending values are filled in automatically as rows are inserted:

-- The value of ID can act like a pointer between related items in different tables.
CREATE TABLE t5 (id INT AUTO_INCREMENT, b CHAR (20), PRIMARY KEY (id));
-- The primary key can consist of more than one column. Any autoinc column must come first.
CREATE TABLE t6 (id INT AUTO_INCREMENT, a INT, b CHAR (20), PRIMARY KEY (id,a));

Although the table works correctly without defining a primary key, the primary key is involved with many aspects of performance and is a crucial design aspect for any large or frequently used table. It is recommended that you always specify a primary key in the CREATE TABLE statement. If you create the table, load data, and then run ALTER TABLE to add a primary key later, that operation is much slower than defining the primary key when creating the table.

This section describes techniques for moving or copying some or all InnoDB tables to a different server. For example, you might move an entire MySQL instance to a larger, faster server; you might clone an entire MySQL instance to a new replication slave server; you might copy individual tables to another server to develop and test an application, or to a data warehouse server to produce reports.

Techniques for moving or copying InnoDB tables include:

Using Lowercase Names for Cross-Platform Moving or Copying

On Windows, InnoDB always stores database and table names internally in lowercase. To move databases in a binary format from Unix to Windows or from Windows to Unix, create all databases and tables using lowercase names. A convenient way to accomplish this is to add the following line to the [mysqld] section of your my.cnf or my.ini file before creating any databases or tables:

[mysqld]
lower_case_table_names=1

Copying Data Files (Cold Backup Method)

You can move an InnoDB database simply by copying all the relevant files listed under "Cold Backups" in Section 14.18, “InnoDB Backup and Recovery”.

Like MyISAM data files, InnoDB data and log files are binary-compatible on all platforms having the same floating-point number format. If the floating-point formats differ but you have not used FLOAT or DOUBLE data types in your tables, then the procedure is the same: simply copy the relevant files.

Export and Import (mysqldump)

You can use mysqldump to dump your tables on one machine and then import the dump files on the other machine. Using this method, it does not matter whether the formats differ or if your tables contain floating-point data.

One way to increase the performance of this method is to switch off autocommit mode when importing data, assuming that the tablespace has enough space for the big rollback segment that the import transactions generate. Do the commit only after importing a whole table or a segment of a table.

By default, connection to the MySQL server begins with autocommit mode enabled, which automatically commits every SQL statement as you execute it. This mode of operation might be unfamiliar if you have experience with other database systems, where it is standard practice to issue a sequence of DML statements and commit them or roll them back all together.

To use multiple-statement transactions, switch autocommit off with the SQL statement SET autocommit = 0 and end each transaction with COMMIT or ROLLBACK as appropriate. To leave autocommit on, begin each transaction with START TRANSACTION and end it with COMMIT or ROLLBACK. The following example shows two transactions. The first is committed; the second is rolled back.

shell> mysql test

mysql> CREATE TABLE customer (a INT, b CHAR (20), INDEX (a))
    -> ENGINE=InnoDB;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> -- Do a transaction with autocommit turned on.
mysql> START TRANSACTION;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> INSERT INTO customer VALUES (10, 'Heikki');
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> COMMIT;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> -- Do another transaction with autocommit turned off.
mysql> SET autocommit=0;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> INSERT INTO customer VALUES (15, 'John');
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> INSERT INTO customer VALUES (20, 'Paul');
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> DELETE FROM customer WHERE b = 'Heikki';
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> -- Now we undo those last 2 inserts and the delete.
mysql> ROLLBACK;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> SELECT * FROM customer;
+------+--------+
| a    | b      |
+------+--------+
|   10 | Heikki |
+------+--------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
mysql>

Transactions in Client-Side Languages

In APIs such as PHP, Perl DBI, JDBC, ODBC, or the standard C call interface of MySQL, you can send transaction control statements such as COMMIT to the MySQL server as strings just like any other SQL statements such as SELECT or INSERT. Some APIs also offer separate special transaction commit and rollback functions or methods.

If you have existing tables, and applications that use them, that you want to convert to InnoDB for better reliability and scalability, use the following guidelines and tips. This section assumes most such tables were originally MyISAM, which was formerly the default.

Reduce Memory Usage for MyISAM, Increase Memory Usage for InnoDB

As you transition away from MyISAM tables, lower the value of the key_buffer_size configuration option to free memory no longer needed for caching results. Increase the value of the innodb_buffer_pool_size configuration option, which performs a similar role of allocating cache memory for InnoDB tables. The InnoDB buffer pool caches both table data and index data, so it does double duty in speeding up lookups for queries and keeping query results in memory for reuse.

Watch Out for Too-Long Or Too-Short Transactions

Because MyISAM tables do not support transactions, you might not have paid much attention to the autocommit configuration option and the COMMIT and ROLLBACK statements. These keywords are important to allow multiple sessions to read and write InnoDB tables concurrently, providing substantial scalability benefits in write-heavy workloads.

While a transaction is open, the system keeps a snapshot of the data as seen at the beginning of the transaction, which can cause substantial overhead if the system inserts, updates, and deletes millions of rows while a stray transaction keeps running. Thus, take care to avoid transactions that run for too long:

The preceding tips save memory and disk space that can be wasted during too-long transactions. When transactions are shorter than they should be, the problem is excessive I/O. With each COMMIT, MySQL makes sure each change is safely recorded to disk, which involves some I/O.

Don't Worry Too Much About Deadlocks

You might see warning messages referring to “deadlocks” in the MySQL error log, or the output of SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS. Despite the scary-sounding name, a deadlock is not a serious issue for InnoDB tables, and often does not require any corrective action. When two transactions start modifying multiple tables, accessing the tables in a different order, they can reach a state where each transaction is waiting for the other and neither can proceed. MySQL immediately detects this condition and cancels (rolls back) the “smaller” transaction, allowing the other to proceed.

Your applications do need error-handling logic to restart a transaction that is forcibly cancelled like this. When you re-issue the same SQL statements as before, the original timing issue no longer applies: either the other transaction has already finished and yours can proceed, or the other transaction is still in progress and your transaction waits until it finishes.

If deadlock warnings occur constantly, you might review the application code to reorder the SQL operations in a consistent way, or to shorten the transactions.

Plan the Storage Layout

To get the best performance from InnoDB tables, you can adjust a number of parameters related to storage layout.

When you convert MyISAM tables that are large, frequently accessed, and hold vital data, investigate and consider the innodb_file_per_table and innodb_file_format configuration options, and the ROW_FORMAT and KEY_BLOCK_SIZE clauses of the CREATE TABLE statement.

During your initial experiments, the most important setting is innodb_file_per_table. When this setting is enabled, new InnoDB tables are implicitly created in file-per-table tablespaces. In contrast with the InnoDB system tablespace, file-per-table tablespaces allow disk space to be reclaimed by the operating system when a table is truncated or dropped. File-per-table tablespaces also support the Barracuda file format and associated features such as table compression and off-page storage for long variable-length columns. For more information, see Section 14.7.4, “InnoDB File-Per-Table Tablespaces”.

Converting an Existing Table

To convert a non-InnoDB table to use InnoDB use ALTER TABLE:

ALTER TABLE table_name ENGINE=InnoDB;

Cloning the Structure of a Table

You might make an InnoDB table that is a clone of a MyISAM table, rather than doing the ALTER TABLE conversion, to test the old and new table side-by-side before switching.

Create an empty InnoDB table with identical column and index definitions. Use show create table table_name\G to see the full CREATE TABLE statement to use. Change the ENGINE clause to ENGINE=INNODB.

Transferring Existing Data

To transfer a large volume of data into an empty InnoDB table created as shown in the previous section, insert the rows with INSERT INTO innodb_table SELECT * FROM myisam_table ORDER BY primary_key_columns.

You can also create the indexes for the InnoDB table after inserting the data. Historically, creating new secondary indexes was a slow operation for InnoDB, but now you can create the indexes after the data is loaded with relatively little overhead from the index creation step.

If you have UNIQUE constraints on secondary keys, you can speed up a table import by turning off the uniqueness checks temporarily during the import operation:

SET unique_checks=0;
... import operation ...
SET unique_checks=1;

For big tables, this saves disk I/O because InnoDB can use its change buffer to write secondary index records as a batch. Be certain that the data contains no duplicate keys. unique_checks permits but does not require storage engines to ignore duplicate keys.

To get better control over the insertion process, you might insert big tables in pieces:

INSERT INTO newtable SELECT * FROM oldtable
   WHERE yourkey > something AND yourkey <= somethingelse;

After all records have been inserted, you can rename the tables.

During the conversion of big tables, increase the size of the InnoDB buffer pool to reduce disk I/O, to a maximum of 80% of physical memory. You can also increase the sizes of the InnoDB log files.

Storage Requirements

If you intend to make several temporary copies of your data in InnoDB tables during the conversion process, it is recommended that you create the tables in file-per-table tablespaces so that you can reclaim the disk space when you drop the tables. As mentioned previously, when the innodb_file_per_table option is enabled, newly created InnoDB tables are implicitly created in file-per-table tablespaces.

Whether you convert the MyISAM table directly or create a cloned InnoDB table, make sure that you have sufficient disk space to hold both the old and new tables during the process. InnoDB tables require more disk space than MyISAM tables. If an ALTER TABLE operation runs out of space, it starts a rollback, and that can take hours if it is disk-bound. For inserts, InnoDB uses the insert buffer to merge secondary index records to indexes in batches. That saves a lot of disk I/O. For rollback, no such mechanism is used, and the rollback can take 30 times longer than the insertion.

In the case of a runaway rollback, if you do not have valuable data in your database, it may be advisable to kill the database process rather than wait for millions of disk I/O operations to complete. For the complete procedure, see Section 14.20.2, “Forcing InnoDB Recovery”.

Carefully Choose a PRIMARY KEY for Each Table

The PRIMARY KEY clause is a critical factor affecting the performance of MySQL queries and the space usage for tables and indexes. Perhaps you have phoned a financial institution where you are asked for an account number. If you do not have the number, you are asked for a dozen different pieces of information to “uniquely identify” yourself. The primary key is like that unique account number that lets you get straight down to business when querying or modifying the information in a table. Every row in the table must have a primary key value, and no two rows can have the same primary key value.

Here are some guidelines for the primary key, followed by more detailed explanations.

Consider adding a primary key to any table that does not already have one. Use the smallest practical numeric type based on the maximum projected size of the table. This can make each row slightly more compact, which can yield substantial space savings for large tables. The space savings are multiplied if the table has any secondary indexes, because the primary key value is repeated in each secondary index entry. In addition to reducing data size on disk, a small primary key also lets more data fit into the buffer pool, speeding up all kinds of operations and improving concurrency.

If the table already has a primary key on some longer column, such as a VARCHAR, consider adding a new unsigned AUTO_INCREMENT column and switching the primary key to that, even if that column is not referenced in queries. This design change can produce substantial space savings in the secondary indexes. You can designate the former primary key columns as UNIQUE NOT NULL to enforce the same constraints as the PRIMARY KEY clause, that is, to prevent duplicate or null values across all those columns.

If you spread related information across multiple tables, typically each table uses the same column for its primary key. For example, a personnel database might have several tables, each with a primary key of employee number. A sales database might have some tables with a primary key of customer number, and other tables with a primary key of order number. Because lookups using the primary key are very fast, you can construct efficient join queries for such tables.

If you leave the PRIMARY KEY clause out entirely, MySQL creates an invisible one for you. It is a 6-byte value that might be longer than you need, thus wasting space. Because it is hidden, you cannot refer to it in queries.

Application Performance Considerations

The extra reliability and scalability features of InnoDB do require more disk storage than equivalent MyISAM tables. You might change the column and index definitions slightly, for better space utilization, reduced I/O and memory consumption when processing result sets, and better query optimization plans making efficient use of index lookups.

If you do set up a numeric ID column for the primary key, use that value to cross-reference with related values in any other tables, particularly for join queries. For example, rather than accepting a country name as input and doing queries searching for the same name, do one lookup to determine the country ID, then do other queries (or a single join query) to look up relevant information across several tables. Rather than storing a customer or catalog item number as a string of digits, potentially using up several bytes, convert it to a numeric ID for storing and querying. A 4-byte unsigned INT column can index over 4 billion items (with the US meaning of billion: 1000 million). For the ranges of the different integer types, see Section 11.2.1, “Integer Types (Exact Value) - INTEGER, INT, SMALLINT, TINYINT, MEDIUMINT, BIGINT”.

Understand Files Associated with InnoDB Tables

InnoDB files require more care and planning than MyISAM files do.

InnoDB provides an optimization that significantly improves scalability and performance of SQL statements that insert rows into tables with AUTO_INCREMENT columns. To use the AUTO_INCREMENT mechanism with an InnoDB table, an AUTO_INCREMENT column ai_col must be defined as part of an index such that it is possible to perform the equivalent of an indexed SELECT MAX(ai_col) lookup on the table to obtain the maximum column value. Typically, this is achieved by making the column the first column of some table index.

This section provides background information on the original (“traditional”) implementation of auto-increment locking in InnoDB, explains the configurable locking mechanism, documents the parameter for configuring the mechanism, and describes its behavior and interaction with replication.

SELECT MAX(ai_col) FROM t FOR UPDATE;

CREATE TABLE t1 (
  c1 INT(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  c2 VARCHAR(10) DEFAULT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (c1)
) ENGINE=InnoDB;

Tx1: INSERT INTO t1 (c2) SELECT 1000 rows from another table ...
Tx2: INSERT INTO t1 (c2) VALUES ('xxx');

This section describes differences in the InnoDB storage engine's handling of foreign keys as compared with that of the MySQL Server.

Foreign Key Definitions

Foreign key definitions for InnoDB tables are subject to the following conditions:

Referential Actions

Referential actions for foreign keys of InnoDB tables are subject to the following conditions:

Foreign Key Usage and Error Information

You can obtain general information about foreign keys and their usage from querying the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.KEY_COLUMN_USAGE table. See also Section 13.1.17.3, “Using FOREIGN KEY Constraints”.

In addition to SHOW ERRORS, in the event of a foreign key error involving InnoDB tables (usually Error 150 in the MySQL Server), you can obtain a detailed explanation of the most recent InnoDB foreign key error by checking the output of SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS.

Maximums and Minimums

Index Types

Restrictions on InnoDB Tables

Locking and Transactions

Because processors and cache memories have increased in speed more than disk storage devices, many workloads are disk-bound. Data compression enables smaller database size, reduced I/O, and improved throughput, at the small cost of increased CPU utilization. Compression is especially valuable for read-intensive applications, on systems with enough RAM to keep frequently used data in memory.

An InnoDB table created with ROW_FORMAT=COMPRESSED can use a smaller page size on disk than the usual 16KB default. Smaller pages require less I/O to read from and write to disk, which is especially valuable for SSD devices.

The page size is specified through the KEY_BLOCK_SIZE parameter. The different page size means the table must be in its own .ibd file rather than in the system tablespace, which requires enabling the innodb_file_per_table option. The level of compression is the same regardless of the KEY_BLOCK_SIZE value. As you specify smaller values for KEY_BLOCK_SIZE, you get the I/O benefits of increasingly smaller pages. But if you specify a value that is too small, there is additional overhead to reorganize the pages when data values cannot be compressed enough to fit multiple rows in each page. There is a hard limit on how small KEY_BLOCK_SIZE can be for a table, based on the lengths of the key columns for each of its indexes. Specify a value that is too small, and the CREATE TABLE or ALTER TABLE statement fails.

In the buffer pool, the compressed data is held in small pages, with a page size based on the KEY_BLOCK_SIZE value. For extracting or updating the column values, MySQL also creates a 16KB page in the buffer pool with the uncompressed data. Within the buffer pool, any updates to the uncompressed page are also re-written back to the equivalent compressed page. You might need to size your buffer pool to accommodate the additional data of both compressed and uncompressed pages, although the uncompressed pages are evicted from the buffer pool when space is needed, and then uncompressed again on the next access.

Before creating a compressed table, make sure the innodb_file_per_table configuration option is enabled, and innodb_file_format is set to Barracuda. You can set these parameters in the MySQL configuration file my.cnf or my.ini, or with the SET statement without shutting down the MySQL server.

To enable compression for a table, you use the clauses ROW_FORMAT=COMPRESSED, KEY_BLOCK_SIZE, or both in a CREATE TABLE or ALTER TABLE statement.

To create a compressed table, you might use statements like these:

SET GLOBAL innodb_file_per_table=1;
SET GLOBAL innodb_file_format=Barracuda;
CREATE TABLE t1
 (c1 INT PRIMARY KEY) 
 ROW_FORMAT=COMPRESSED 
 KEY_BLOCK_SIZE=8;

The default uncompressed size of InnoDB data pages is 16KB. Depending on the combination of option values, MySQL uses a page size of 1KB, 2KB, 4KB, 8KB, or 16KB for the .ibd file of the table. The actual compression algorithm is not affected by the KEY_BLOCK_SIZE value; the value determines how large each compressed chunk is, which in turn affects how many rows can be packed into each compressed page.

Setting KEY_BLOCK_SIZE=16 typically does not result in much compression, since the normal InnoDB page size is 16KB. This setting may still be useful for tables with many long BLOB, VARCHAR or TEXT columns, because such values often do compress well, and might therefore require fewer overflow pages as described in Section 14.9.5, “How Compression Works for InnoDB Tables”.

All indexes of a table (including the clustered index) are compressed using the same page size, as specified in the CREATE TABLE or ALTER TABLE statement. Table attributes such as ROW_FORMAT and KEY_BLOCK_SIZE are not part of the CREATE INDEX syntax, and are ignored if they are specified (although you see them in the output of the SHOW CREATE TABLE statement).

Restrictions on Compressed Tables

Because MySQL versions prior to 5.1 cannot process compressed tables, using compression requires specifying the configuration parameter innodb_file_format=Barracuda, to avoid accidentally introducing compatibility issues.

Table compression is also not available for the InnoDB system tablespace. The system tablespace (space 0, the ibdata* files) can contain user data, but it also contains internal system information, and therefore is never compressed. Thus, compression applies only to tables (and indexes) stored in their own tablespaces, that is, created with the innodb_file_per_table option enabled.

Compression applies to an entire table and all its associated indexes, not to individual rows, despite the clause name ROW_FORMAT.

Most often, the internal optimizations described in InnoDB Data Storage and Compression ensure that the system runs well with compressed data. However, because the efficiency of compression depends on the nature of your data, you can make decisions that affect the performance of compressed tables:

Use the guidelines in this section to help make those architectural and configuration choices. When you are ready to conduct long-term testing and put compressed tables into production, see Section 14.9.4, “Monitoring Compression at Runtime” for ways to verify the effectiveness of those choices under real-world conditions.

When to Use Compression

In general, compression works best on tables that include a reasonable number of character string columns and where the data is read far more often than it is written. Because there are no guaranteed ways to predict whether or not compression benefits a particular situation, always test with a specific workload and data set running on a representative configuration. Consider the following factors when deciding which tables to compress.

Data Characteristics and Compression

A key determinant of the efficiency of compression in reducing the size of data files is the nature of the data itself. Recall that compression works by identifying repeated strings of bytes in a block of data. Completely randomized data is the worst case. Typical data often has repeated values, and so compresses effectively. Character strings often compress well, whether defined in CHAR, VARCHAR, TEXT or BLOB columns. On the other hand, tables containing mostly binary data (integers or floating point numbers) or data that is previously compressed (for example JPEG or PNG images) may not generally compress well, significantly or at all.

You choose whether to turn on compression for each InnoDB table. A table and all of its indexes use the same (compressed) page size. It might be that the primary key (clustered) index, which contains the data for all columns of a table, compresses more effectively than the secondary indexes. For those cases where there are long rows, the use of compression might result in long column values being stored “off-page”, as discussed in Section 14.11.3, “DYNAMIC and COMPRESSED Row Formats”. Those overflow pages may compress well. Given these considerations, for many applications, some tables compress more effectively than others, and you might find that your workload performs best only with a subset of tables compressed.

To determine whether or not to compress a particular table, conduct experiments. You can get a rough estimate of how efficiently your data can be compressed by using a utility that implements LZ77 compression (such as gzip or WinZip) on a copy of the .ibd file for an uncompressed table. You can expect less compression from a MySQL compressed table than from file-based compression tools, because MySQL compresses data in chunks based on the page size, 16KB by default. In addition to user data, the page format includes some internal system data that is not compressed. File-based compression utilities can examine much larger chunks of data, and so might find more repeated strings in a huge file than MySQL can find in an individual page.

Another way to test compression on a specific table is to copy some data from your uncompressed table to a similar, compressed table (having all the same indexes) and look at the size of the resulting .ibd file. For example:

use test;
set global innodb_file_per_table=1;
set global innodb_file_format=Barracuda;
set global autocommit=0;

-- Create an uncompressed table with a million or two rows.
create table big_table as select * from information_schema.columns;
insert into big_table select * from big_table;
insert into big_table select * from big_table;
insert into big_table select * from big_table;
insert into big_table select * from big_table;
insert into big_table select * from big_table;
insert into big_table select * from big_table;
insert into big_table select * from big_table;
insert into big_table select * from big_table;
insert into big_table select * from big_table;
insert into big_table select * from big_table;
commit;
alter table big_table add id int unsigned not null primary key auto_increment;

show create table big_table\G

select count(id) from big_table;

-- Check how much space is needed for the uncompressed table.
\! ls -l data/test/big_table.ibd

create table key_block_size_4 like big_table;
alter table key_block_size_4 key_block_size=4 row_format=compressed;

insert into key_block_size_4 select * from big_table;
commit;

-- Check how much space is needed for a compressed table
-- with particular compression settings.
\! ls -l data/test/key_block_size_4.ibd

This experiment produced the following numbers, which of course could vary considerably depending on your table structure and data:

-rw-rw----  1 cirrus  staff  310378496 Jan  9 13:44 data/test/big_table.ibd
-rw-rw----  1 cirrus  staff  83886080 Jan  9 15:10 data/test/key_block_size_4.ibd

To see whether compression is efficient for your particular workload, use a MySQL instance with no other compressed tables and run queries against the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.INNODB_CMP table. For exmaple, you examine the ratio of successful compression operations to overall compression operations. (In the INNODB_CMP table, compare COMPRESS_OPS to COMPRESS_OPS_OK. See INNODB_CMP for more information.) If a high percentage of compression operations complete successfully, the table might be a good candidate for compression.

Compression and Application and Schema Design

Decide whether to compress data in your application or in the table; do not use both types of compression for the same data. When you compress the data in the application and store the results in a compressed table, extra space savings are extremely unlikely, and the double compression just wastes CPU cycles.

Compressing in the Database

The InnoDB table compression is automatic and applies to all columns and index values. The columns can still be tested with operators such as LIKE, and sort operations can still use indexes even when the index values are compressed. Because indexes are often a significant fraction of the total size of a database, compression could result in significant savings in storage, I/O or processor time. The compression and decompression operations happen on the database server, which likely is a powerful system that is sized to handle the expected load.

Compressing in the Application

If you compress data such as text in your application, before it is inserted into the database, You might save overhead for data that does not compress well by compressing some columns and not others. This approach uses CPU cycles for compression and uncompression on the client machine rather than the database server, which might be appropriate for a distributed application with many clients, or where the client machine has spare CPU cycles.

Hybrid Approach

Of course, it is possible to combine these approaches. For some applications, it may be appropriate to use some compressed tables and some uncompressed tables. It may be best to externally compress some data (and store it in uncompressed InnoDB tables) and allow InnoDB to compress (some of) the other tables in the application. As always, up-front design and real-life testing are valuable in reaching the right decision.

Workload Characteristics and Compression

In addition to choosing which tables to compress (and the page size), the workload is another key determinant of performance. If the application is dominated by reads, rather than updates, fewer pages need to be reorganized and recompressed after the index page runs out of room for the per-page “modification log” that InnoDB maintains for compressed data. If the updates predominantly change non-indexed columns or those containing BLOBs or large strings that happen to be stored “off-page”, the overhead of compression may be acceptable. If the only changes to a table are INSERTs that use a monotonically increasing primary key, and there are few secondary indexes, there is little need to reorganize and recompress index pages. Since InnoDB can “delete-mark” and delete rows on compressed pages “in place” by modifying uncompressed data, DELETE operations on a table are relatively efficient.

For some environments, the time it takes to load data can be as important as run-time retrieval. Especially in data warehouse environments, many tables may be read-only or read-mostly. In those cases, it might or might not be acceptable to pay the price of compression in terms of increased load time, unless the resulting savings in fewer disk reads or in storage cost is significant.

Fundamentally, compression works best when the CPU time is available for compressing and uncompressing data. Thus, if your workload is I/O bound, rather than CPU-bound, you might find that compression can improve overall performance. When you test your application performance with different compression configurations, test on a platform similar to the planned configuration of the production system.

Configuration Characteristics and Compression

Reading and writing database pages from and to disk is the slowest aspect of system performance. Compression attempts to reduce I/O by using CPU time to compress and uncompress data, and is most effective when I/O is a relatively scarce resource compared to processor cycles.

This is often especially the case when running in a multi-user environment with fast, multi-core CPUs. When a page of a compressed table is in memory, InnoDB often uses an additional 16K in the buffer pool for an uncompressed copy of the page. The adaptive LRU algorithm in the InnoDB storage engine attempts to balance the use of memory between compressed and uncompressed pages to take into account whether the workload is running in an I/O-bound or CPU-bound manner. Still, a configuration with more memory dedicated to the InnoDB buffer pool tends to run better when using compressed tables than a configuration where memory is highly constrained.

Choosing the Compressed Page Size

The optimal setting of the compressed page size depends on the type and distribution of data that the table and its indexes contain. The compressed page size should always be bigger than the maximum record size, or operations may fail as noted in Compression of B-Tree Pages.

Setting the compressed page size too large wastes some space, but the pages do not have to be compressed as often. If the compressed page size is set too small, inserts or updates may require time-consuming recompression, and the B-tree nodes may have to be split more frequently, leading to bigger data files and less efficient indexing.

Typically, you set the compressed page size to 8K or 4K bytes. Given that the maximum row size for an InnoDB table is around 8K, KEY_BLOCK_SIZE=8 is usually a safe choice.

Overall application performance, CPU and I/O utilization and the size of disk files are good indicators of how effective compression is for your application. This section builds on the performance tuning advice from Section 14.9.3, “Tuning Compression for InnoDB Tables”, and shows how to find problems that might not turn up during initial testing.

To dig deeper into performance considerations for compressed tables, you can monitor compression performance at runtime using the Information Schema tables described in Example 14.1, “Using the Compression Information Schema Tables”. These tables reflect the internal use of memory and the rates of compression used overall.

The INNODB_CMP table reports information about compression activity for each compressed page size (KEY_BLOCK_SIZE) in use. The information in these tables is system-wide: it summarizes the compression statistics across all compressed tables in your database. You can use this data to help decide whether or not to compress a table by examining these tables when no other compressed tables are being accessed. It involves relatively low overhead on the server, so you might query it periodically on a production server to check the overall efficiency of the compression feature.

The key statistics to consider are the number of, and amount of time spent performing, compression and uncompression operations. Since InnoDB must split B-tree nodes when they are too full to contain the compressed data following a modification, compare the number of “successful” compression operations with the number of such operations overall. Based on the information in the INNODB_CMP tables and overall application performance and hardware resource utilization, you might make changes in your hardware configuration, adjust the size of the InnoDB buffer pool, choose a different page size, or select a different set of tables to compress.

If the amount of CPU time required for compressing and uncompressing is high, changing to faster CPUs, or those with more cores, can help improve performance with the same data, application workload and set of compressed tables. Increasing the size of the InnoDB buffer pool might also help performance, so that more uncompressed pages can stay in memory, reducing the need to uncompress pages that exist in memory only in compressed form.

A large number of compression operations overall (compared to the number of INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE operations in your application and the size of the database) could indicate that some of your compressed tables are being updated too heavily for effective compression. If so, choose a larger page size, or be more selective about which tables you compress.

If the number of “successful” compression operations (COMPRESS_OPS_OK) is a high percentage of the total number of compression operations (COMPRESS_OPS), then the system is likely performing well. If the ratio is low, then InnoDB is reorganizing, recompressing, and splitting B-tree nodes more often than is desirable. In this case, avoid compressing some tables, or increase KEY_BLOCK_SIZE for some of the compressed tables. You might turn off compression for tables that cause the number of “compression failures” in your application to be more than 1% or 2% of the total. (Such a failure ratio might be acceptable during a temporary operation such as a data load).

This section describes some internal implementation details about compression for InnoDB tables. The information presented here may be helpful in tuning for performance, but is not necessary to know for basic use of compression.

Compression Algorithms

Some operating systems implement compression at the file system level. Files are typically divided into fixed-size blocks that are compressed into variable-size blocks, which easily leads into fragmentation. Every time something inside a block is modified, the whole block is recompressed before it is written to disk. These properties make this compression technique unsuitable for use in an update-intensive database system.

InnoDB implements compression with the help of the well-known zlib library, which implements the LZ77 compression algorithm. This compression algorithm is mature, robust, and efficient in both CPU utilization and in reduction of data size. The algorithm is “lossless”, so that the original uncompressed data can always be reconstructed from the compressed form. LZ77 compression works by finding sequences of data that are repeated within the data to be compressed. The patterns of values in your data determine how well it compresses, but typical user data often compresses by 50% or more.

Unlike compression performed by an application, or compression features of some other database management systems, InnoDB compression applies both to user data and to indexes. In many cases, indexes can constitute 40-50% or more of the total database size, so this difference is significant. When compression is working well for a data set, the size of the InnoDB data files (the .idb files) is 25% to 50% of the uncompressed size or possibly smaller. Depending on the workload, this smaller database can in turn lead to a reduction in I/O, and an increase in throughput, at a modest cost in terms of increased CPU utilization.

InnoDB Data Storage and Compression

All user data in InnoDB tables is stored in pages comprising a B-tree index (the clustered index). In some other database systems, this type of index is called an “index-organized table”. Each row in the index node contains the values of the (user-specified or system-generated) primary key and all the other columns of the table.

Secondary indexes in InnoDB tables are also B-trees, containing pairs of values: the index key and a pointer to a row in the clustered index. The pointer is in fact the value of the primary key of the table, which is used to access the clustered index if columns other than the index key and primary key are required. Secondary index records must always fit on a single B-tree page.

The compression of B-tree nodes (of both clustered and secondary indexes) is handled differently from compression of overflow pages used to store long VARCHAR, BLOB, or TEXT columns, as explained in the following sections.

Compression of B-Tree Pages

Because they are frequently updated, B-tree pages require special treatment. It is important to minimize the number of times B-tree nodes are split, as well as to minimize the need to uncompress and recompress their content.

One technique InnoDB uses is to maintain some system information in the B-tree node in uncompressed form, thus facilitating certain in-place updates. For example, this allows rows to be delete-marked and deleted without any compression operation.

In addition, InnoDB attempts to avoid unnecessary uncompression and recompression of index pages when they are changed. Within each B-tree page, the system keeps an uncompressed “modification log” to record changes made to the page. Updates and inserts of small records may be written to this modification log without requiring the entire page to be completely reconstructed.

When the space for the modification log runs out, InnoDB uncompresses the page, applies the changes and recompresses the page. If recompression fails (a situation known as a compression failure), the B-tree nodes are split and the process is repeated until the update or insert succeeds.

Generally, InnoDB requires that each B-tree page can accommodate at least two records. For compressed tables, this requirement has been relaxed. Leaf pages of B-tree nodes (whether of the primary key or secondary indexes) only need to accommodate one record, but that record must fit in uncompressed form, in the per-page modification log. Starting with InnoDB storage engine version 1.0.2, and if innodb_strict_mode is ON, the InnoDB storage engine checks the maximum row size during CREATE TABLE or CREATE INDEX. If the row does not fit, the following error message is issued: ERROR HY000: Too big row.

If you create a table when innodb_strict_mode is OFF, and a subsequent INSERT or UPDATE statement attempts to create an index entry that does not fit in the size of the compressed page, the operation fails with ERROR 42000: Row size too large. (This error message does not name the index for which the record is too large, or mention the length of the index record or the maximum record size on that particular index page.) To solve this problem, rebuild the table with ALTER TABLE and select a larger compressed page size (KEY_BLOCK_SIZE), shorten any column prefix indexes, or disable compression entirely with ROW_FORMAT=DYNAMIC or ROW_FORMAT=COMPACT.

Compressing BLOB, VARCHAR, and TEXT Columns

In an InnoDB table, BLOB, VARCHAR, and TEXT columns that are not part of the primary key may be stored on separately allocated overflow pages. We refer to these columns as off-page columns. Their values are stored on singly-linked lists of overflow pages.

For tables created in ROW_FORMAT=DYNAMIC or ROW_FORMAT=COMPRESSED, the values of BLOB, TEXT, or VARCHAR columns may be stored fully off-page, depending on their length and the length of the entire row. For columns that are stored off-page, the clustered index record only contains 20-byte pointers to the overflow pages, one per column. Whether any columns are stored off-page depends on the page size and the total size of the row. When the row is too long to fit entirely within the page of the clustered index, MySQL chooses the longest columns for off-page storage until the row fits on the clustered index page. As noted above, if a row does not fit by itself on a compressed page, an error occurs.

Tables created in older versions of InnoDB use the Antelope file format, which supports only ROW_FORMAT=REDUNDANT and ROW_FORMAT=COMPACT. In these formats, MySQL stores the first 768 bytes of BLOB, VARCHAR, and TEXT columns in the clustered index record along with the primary key. The 768-byte prefix is followed by a 20-byte pointer to the overflow pages that contain the rest of the column value.

When a table is in COMPRESSED format, all data written to overflow pages is compressed “as is”; that is, InnoDB applies the zlib compression algorithm to the entire data item. Other than the data, compressed overflow pages contain an uncompressed header and trailer comprising a page checksum and a link to the next overflow page, among other things. Therefore, very significant storage savings can be obtained for longer BLOB, TEXT, or VARCHAR columns if the data is highly compressible, as is often the case with text data. Image data, such as JPEG, is typically already compressed and so does not benefit much from being stored in a compressed table; the double compression can waste CPU cycles for little or no space savings.

The overflow pages are of the same size as other pages. A row containing ten columns stored off-page occupies ten overflow pages, even if the total length of the columns is only 8K bytes. In an uncompressed table, ten uncompressed overflow pages occupy 160K bytes. In a compressed table with an 8K page size, they occupy only 80K bytes. Thus, it is often more efficient to use compressed table format for tables with long column values.

Using a 16K compressed page size can reduce storage and I/O costs for BLOB, VARCHAR, or TEXT columns, because such data often compress well, and might therefore require fewer overflow pages, even though the B-tree nodes themselves take as many pages as in the uncompressed form.

Compression and the InnoDB Buffer Pool

In a compressed InnoDB table, every compressed page (whether 1K, 2K, 4K or 8K) corresponds to an uncompressed page of 16K bytes. To access the data in a page, InnoDB reads the compressed page from disk if it is not already in the buffer pool, then uncompresses the page to its original form. This section describes how InnoDB manages the buffer pool with respect to pages of compressed tables.

To minimize I/O and to reduce the need to uncompress a page, at times the buffer pool contains both the compressed and uncompressed form of a database page. To make room for other required database pages, InnoDB may evict from the buffer pool an uncompressed page, while leaving the compressed page in memory. Or, if a page has not been accessed in a while, the compressed form of the page might be written to disk, to free space for other data. Thus, at any given time, the buffer pool might contain both the compressed and uncompressed forms of the page, or only the compressed form of the page, or neither.

InnoDB keeps track of which pages to keep in memory and which to evict using a least-recently-used (LRU) list, so that hot (frequently accessed) data tends to stay in memory. When compressed tables are accessed, MySQL uses an adaptive LRU algorithm to achieve an appropriate balance of compressed and uncompressed pages in memory. This adaptive algorithm is sensitive to whether the system is running in an I/O-bound or CPU-bound manner. The goal is to avoid spending too much processing time uncompressing pages when the CPU is busy, and to avoid doing excess I/O when the CPU has spare cycles that can be used for uncompressing compressed pages (that may already be in memory). When the system is I/O-bound, the algorithm prefers to evict the uncompressed copy of a page rather than both copies, to make more room for other disk pages to become memory resident. When the system is CPU-bound, MySQL prefers to evict both the compressed and uncompressed page, so that more memory can be used for “hot” pages and reducing the need to uncompress data in memory only in compressed form.

Compression and the InnoDB Redo Log Files

Before a compressed page is written to a data file, MySQL writes a copy of the page to the redo log (if it has been recompressed since the last time it was written to the database). This is done to ensure that redo logs are usable for crash recovery, even in the unlikely case that the zlib library is upgraded and that change introduces a compatibility problem with the compressed data. Therefore, some increase in the size of log files, or a need for more frequent checkpoints, can be expected when using compression. The amount of increase in the log file size or checkpoint frequency depends on the number of times compressed pages are modified in a way that requires reorganization and recompression.

Note that compressed tables use a different file format for the redo log and the per-table tablespaces than in MySQL 5.1 and earlier. The MySQL Enterprise Backup product supports this latest Barracuda file format for compressed InnoDB tables.

Specifying ROW_FORMAT=COMPRESSED or KEY_BLOCK_SIZE in CREATE TABLE or ALTER TABLE statements produces the following warnings if the Barracuda file format is not enabled. You can view them with the SHOW WARNINGS statement.

Notes:

The “non-strict” behavior lets you import a mysqldump file into a database that does not support compressed tables, even if the source database contained compressed tables. In that case, MySQL creates the table in ROW_FORMAT=COMPACT instead of preventing the operation.

To import the dump file into a new database, and have the tables re-created as they exist in the original database, ensure the server has the proper settings for the configuration parameters innodb_file_format and innodb_file_per_table.

The attribute KEY_BLOCK_SIZE is permitted only when ROW_FORMAT is specified as COMPRESSED or is omitted. Specifying a KEY_BLOCK_SIZE with any other ROW_FORMAT generates a warning that you can view with SHOW WARNINGS. However, the table is non-compressed; the specified KEY_BLOCK_SIZE is ignored).

If you are running with innodb_strict_mode enabled, the combination of a KEY_BLOCK_SIZE with any ROW_FORMAT other than COMPRESSED generates an error, not a warning, and the table is not created.

Table 14.3, “Meaning of CREATE TABLE and ALTER TABLE options” summarizes how the various options on CREATE TABLE and ALTER TABLE are handled.

Table 14.4, “CREATE/ALTER TABLE Warnings and Errors when InnoDB Strict Mode is OFF” summarizes error conditions that occur with certain combinations of configuration parameters and options on the CREATE TABLE or ALTER TABLE statements, and how the options appear in the output of SHOW TABLE STATUS.

When innodb_strict_mode is OFF, InnoDB creates or alters the table, but ignores certain settings as shown below. You can see the warning messages in the MySQL error log. When innodb_strict_mode is ON, these specified combinations of options generate errors, and the table is not created or altered. To see the full description of the error condition, issue the SHOW ERRORS statement: example:

mysql> CREATE TABLE x (id INT PRIMARY KEY, c INT)

-> ENGINE=INNODB KEY_BLOCK_SIZE=33333;

ERROR 1005 (HY000): Can't create table 'test.x' (errno: 1478)

mysql> SHOW ERRORS;
+-------+------+-------------------------------------------+ 
| Level | Code | Message                                   | 
+-------+------+-------------------------------------------+ 
| Error | 1478 | InnoDB: invalid KEY_BLOCK_SIZE=33333.     | 
| Error | 1005 | Can't create table 'test.x' (errno: 1478) | 
+-------+------+-------------------------------------------+ 

When innodb_strict_mode is ON, the InnoDB storage engine rejects invalid ROW_FORMAT or KEY_BLOCK_SIZE parameters. For compatibility with earlier versions of MySQL, strict mode is not enabled by default; instead, MySQL issues warnings (not errors) for ignored invalid parameters.

Note that it is not possible to see the chosen KEY_BLOCK_SIZE using SHOW TABLE STATUS. The statement SHOW CREATE TABLE displays the KEY_BLOCK_SIZE (even if it was ignored when creating the table). The real compressed page size of the table cannot be displayed by MySQL.

The innodb_file_format configuration parameter defines the file format to use for new InnoDB tables that are created in file_per_table tablespaces. Therefore, to use the innodb_file_format parameter, innodb_file_per_table must be enabled.

To create new tables that take advantage of features supported by the Barracuda file format, including table compression (see Section 14.11, “InnoDB Row Storage and Row Formats”) and off-page storage for long column data (see Section 14.11, “InnoDB Row Storage and Row Formats”), set innodb_file_format to Barracuda. You must also specify ROW_FORMAT=COMPRESSED or ROW_FORMAT=DYNAMIC when creating the table.

To preclude the use of features supported by the Barracuda file that make your database inaccessible to the built-in InnoDB in MySQL 5.1 and prior releases, set innodb_file_format to Antelope. Alternatively, you can disable innodb_file_per_table to have new tables created in the system tablespace. The system tablespace is stored in the original Antelope file format.

You can set the value of innodb_file_format on the command line when you start mysqld, or in the option file (my.cnf on Unix, my.ini on Windows). You can also change it dynamically with the SET GLOBAL statement.

mysql> SET GLOBAL innodb_file_format=BARRACUDA;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

Be aware that ALTER TABLE operations that recreate InnoDB tables use the current innodb_file_format setting.

Although Oracle recommends using the Barracuda format for new tables where practical, in MySQL 5.5 the default file format is Antelope, for maximum compatibility with replication configurations containing earlier MySQL releases.

InnoDB incorporates several checks to guard against the possible crashes and data corruptions that might occur if you run an older release of the MySQL server on InnoDB data files using the new Barracuda file format. These checks take place when the server is started, and when you first access a table. This section describes these checks, how you can control them, and error and warning conditions that might arise.

Backward Compatibility

Considerations of backward compatibility only apply when using a recent version of InnoDB (the InnoDB Plugin, or MySQL 5.5 and higher with InnoDB) alongside an older one (MySQL 5.1 or earlier, with the built-in InnoDB rather than the InnoDB Plugin). To minimize the chance of compatibility issues, you can standardize on the InnoDB Plugin for all your MySQL 5.1 and earlier database servers.

In general, a newer version of InnoDB may create a table or index that cannot safely be read or written with a prior version of InnoDB without risk of crashes, hangs, wrong results or corruptions. MySQL 5.5 and higher with InnoDB includes a mechanism to guard against these conditions, and to help preserve compatibility among database files and versions of InnoDB. This mechanism lets you take advantage of some new features of an InnoDB release (such as performance improvements and bug fixes), and still preserve the option of using your database with a prior version of InnoDB, by preventing accidental use of new features that create downward-incompatible disk files.

If a version of InnoDB supports a particular file format (whether or not that format is the default), you can query and update any table that requires that format or an earlier format. Only the creation of new tables using new features is limited based on the particular file format enabled. Conversely, if a tablespace contains a table or index that uses a file format that is not supported by the currently running software, it cannot be accessed at all, even for read access.

The only way to “downgrade” an InnoDB tablespace to the earlier Antelope file format is to copy the data to a new table, in a tablespace that uses the earlier format. This can be done with the ALTER TABLE statement, as described in Section 14.10.4, “Downgrading the File Format”.

The easiest way to determine the file format of an existing InnoDB tablespace is to examine the properties of the table it contains, using the SHOW TABLE STATUS command or querying the table INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES. If the Row_format of the table is reported as 'Compressed' or 'Dynamic', the tablespace containing the table uses the Barracuda format. Otherwise, it uses the prior InnoDB file format, Antelope.

Internal Details

Every InnoDB file-per-table tablespace (represented by a *.ibd file) file is labeled with a file format identifier. The system tablespace (represented by the ibdata files) is tagged with the “highest” file format in use in a group of InnoDB database files, and this tag is checked when the files are opened.

Creating a compressed table, or a table with ROW_FORMAT=DYNAMIC, updates the file header for the corresponding .ibd file and the table type in the InnoDB data dictionary with the identifier for the Barracuda file format. From that point forward, the table cannot be used with a version of InnoDB that does not support this new file format. To protect against anomalous behavior, InnoDB version 5.0.21 and later performs a compatibility check when the table is opened. (In many cases, the ALTER TABLE statement recreates a table and thus changes its properties. The special case of adding or dropping indexes without rebuilding the table is described in Section 14.13, “InnoDB Fast Index Creation”.)

Definition of ib-file set

To avoid confusion, for the purposes of this discussion we define the term “ib-file set” to mean the set of operating system files that InnoDB manages as a unit. The ib-file set includes the following files:

An “ib-file set” does not include the corresponding .frm files that contain metadata about InnoDB tables. The .frm files are created and managed by MySQL, and can sometimes get out of sync with the internal metadata in InnoDB.

Multiple tables, even from more than one database, can be stored in a single “ib-file set”. (In MySQL, a “database” is a logical collection of tables, what other systems refer to as a “schema” or “catalog”.)

InnoDB: Error: the system tablespace is in a
file format that this version doesn't support

InnoDB: Warning: the system tablespace is in a
file format that this version doesn't support

ERROR 1146 (42S02): Table 'test.t1' doesn't exist

InnoDB: table test/t1: unknown table type 33

If you enable a different file format using the innodb_file_format configuration option, the change only applies to newly created tables. Also, when you create a new table, the tablespace containing the table is tagged with the “earliest” or “simplest” file format that is required to support the table's features. For example, if you enable the Barracuda file format, and create a new table that does not use the Dynamic or Compressed row format, the new tablespace that contains the table is tagged as using the Antelope file format .

It is easy to identify the file format used by a given table. The table uses the Antelope file format if the row format reported by SHOW TABLE STATUS is either Compact or Redundant. The table uses the Barracuda file format if the row format reported by SHOW TABLE STATUS is either Compressed or Dynamic.

mysql> SHOW TABLE STATUS\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
           Name: t1
         Engine: InnoDB
        Version: 10
     Row_format: Compact
           Rows: 0
 Avg_row_length: 0
    Data_length: 16384
Max_data_length: 0
   Index_length: 16384
      Data_free: 0
 Auto_increment: 1
    Create_time: 2014-11-03 13:32:10
    Update_time: NULL
     Check_time: NULL
      Collation: latin1_swedish_ci
       Checksum: NULL
 Create_options: 
        Comment: 
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Each InnoDB tablespace file (with a name matching *.ibd) is tagged with the file format used to create its table and indexes. The way to downgrade the tablespace is to re-create the table and its indexes. The easiest way to recreate a table and its indexes is to use the command:

ALTER TABLE t ROW_FORMAT=COMPACT;

on each table that you want to downgrade. The COMPACT row format uses the file format Antelope. It was introduced in MySQL 5.0.3.

The storage for rows and associated columns affects performance for queries and DML operations. As more rows fit into a single disk page, queries and index lookups can work faster, less cache memory is required in the InnoDB buffer pool, and less I/O is required to write out updated values for the numeric and short string columns.

The data in each InnoDB table is divided into pages. The pages that make up each table are arranged in a tree data structure called a B-tree index. Table data and secondary indexes both use this type of structure. The B-tree index that represents an entire table is known as the clustered index, which is organized according to the primary key columns. The nodes of the index data structure contain the values of all the columns in that row (for the clustered index) or the index columns and the primary key columns (for secondary indexes).

Variable-length columns are an exception to this rule. Columns such as BLOB and VARCHAR that are too long to fit on a B-tree page are stored on separately allocated disk pages called overflow pages. We call such columns off-page columns. The values of these columns are stored in singly-linked lists of overflow pages, and each such column has its own list of one or more overflow pages. In some cases, all or a prefix of the long column value is stored in the B-tree, to avoid wasting storage and eliminating the need to read a separate page.

The Barracuda file format provides a new option (KEY_BLOCK_SIZE) to control how much column data is stored in the clustered index, and how much is placed on overflow pages.

The next section describes the clauses you can use with the CREATE TABLE and ALTER TABLE statements to control how these variable-length columns are represented: ROW_FORMAT and KEY_BLOCK_SIZE. To use these clauses, you might also need to change the settings for the innodb_file_per_table and innodb_file_format configuration options.

You specify the row format for a table with the ROW_FORMAT clause of the CREATE TABLE and ALTER TABLE statements. For example:

CREATE TABLE t1 (f1 int unsigned) ROW_FORMAT=DYNAMIC ENGINE=INNODB;
    

InnoDB ROW_FORMAT options include COMPACT, REDUNDANT, DYNAMIC, and COMPRESSED. For InnoDB tables, rows are stored in COMPACT format (ROW_FORMAT=COMPACT) by default. Refer to the CREATE TABLE documentation for additional information about the ROW_FORMAT table option.

The physical row structure for InnoDB tables is dependant on the ROW_FORMAT that you specify. See Section 14.5.6.6, “Physical Row Structure” for more information.

This section discusses the DYNAMIC and COMPRESSED row formats for InnoDB tables. You can only create these kinds of tables when the innodb_file_format configuration option is set to Barracuda. (The Barracuda file format also allows the COMPACT and REDUNDANT row formats.)

When a table is created with ROW_FORMAT=DYNAMIC or ROW_FORMAT=COMPRESSED, long column values are stored fully off-page, and the clustered index record contains only a 20-byte pointer to the overflow page.

Whether any columns are stored off-page depends on the page size and the total size of the row. When the row is too long, InnoDB chooses the longest columns for off-page storage until the clustered index record fits on the B-tree page. TEXT and BLOB columns that are less than or equal to 40 bytes are always stored in-line.

The DYNAMIC row format maintains the efficiency of storing the entire row in the index node if it fits (as do the COMPACT and REDUNDANT formats), but this new format avoids the problem of filling B-tree nodes with a large number of data bytes of long columns. The DYNAMIC format is based on the idea that if a portion of a long data value is stored off-page, it is usually most efficient to store all of the value off-page. With DYNAMIC format, shorter columns are likely to remain in the B-tree node, minimizing the number of overflow pages needed for any given row.

The COMPRESSED row format uses similar internal details for off-page storage as the DYNAMIC row format, with additional storage and performance considerations from the table and index data being compressed and using smaller page sizes. With the COMPRESSED row format, the option KEY_BLOCK_SIZE controls how much column data is stored in the clustered index, and how much is placed on overflow pages. For full details about the COMPRESSED row format, see Section 14.9, “InnoDB Table Compression”.

Early versions of InnoDB used an unnamed file format (now called Antelope) for database files. With that file format, tables are defined with ROW_FORMAT=COMPACT or ROW_FORMAT=REDUNDANT. InnoDB stores up to the first 768 bytes of variable-length columns (such as BLOB and VARCHAR) in the index record within the B-tree node, with the remainder stored on the overflow pages.

To preserve compatibility with those prior versions, tables created with the newest InnoDB default to the COMPACT row format. See Section 14.11.3, “DYNAMIC and COMPRESSED Row Formats” for information about the newer DYNAMIC and COMPRESSED row formats.

With the Antelope file format, if the value of a column is 768 bytes or less, no overflow page is needed, and some savings in I/O may result, since the value is in the B-tree node. This works well for relatively short BLOBs, but may cause B-tree nodes to fill with data rather than key values, reducing their efficiency. Tables with many BLOB columns could cause B-tree nodes to become too full of data, and contain too few rows, making the entire index less efficient than if the rows were shorter or if the column values were stored off-page.

InnoDB uses asynchronous disk I/O where possible, by creating a number of threads to handle I/O operations, while permitting other database operations to proceed while the I/O is still in progress. On Linux and Windows platforms, InnoDB uses the available OS and library functions to perform “native” asynchronous I/O. On other platforms, InnoDB still uses I/O threads, but the threads may actually wait for I/O requests to complete; this technique is known as “simulated” asynchronous I/O.

Read-Ahead

If InnoDB can determine there is a high probability that data might be needed soon, it performs read-ahead operations to bring that data into the buffer pool so that it is available in memory. Making a few large read requests for contiguous data can be more efficient than making several small, spread-out requests. There are two read-ahead heuristics in InnoDB:

Doublewrite Buffer

InnoDB uses a novel file flush technique involving a structure called the doublewrite buffer, which is enabled by default (innodb_doublewrite=ON). It adds safety to recovery following a crash or power outage, and improves performance on most varieties of Unix by reducing the need for fsync() operations.

Before writing pages to a data file, InnoDB first writes them to a contiguous tablespace area called the doublewrite buffer. Only after the write and the flush to the doublewrite buffer has completed does InnoDB write the pages to their proper positions in the data file. If there is an operating system, storage subsystem, or mysqld process crash in the middle of a page write (causing a torn page condition), InnoDB can later find a good copy of the page from the doublewrite buffer during recovery.

The data files that you define in the configuration file form the InnoDB system tablespace. The files are logically concatenated to form the tablespace. There is no striping in use. Currently, you cannot define where within the tablespace your tables are allocated. In a newly created tablespace, InnoDB allocates space starting from the first data file.

To avoid the issues that come with storing all tables and indexes inside the system tablespace, you can turn on the innodb_file_per_table configuration option, which stores each newly created table in a separate tablespace file (with extension .ibd). For tables stored this way, there is less fragmentation within the disk file, and when the table is truncated, the space is returned to the operating system rather than still being reserved by InnoDB within the system tablespace.

Pages, Extents, Segments, and Tablespaces

Each tablespace consists of database pages with a default size of 16KB. The pages are grouped into extents of size 1MB (64 consecutive pages). The “files” inside a tablespace are called segments in InnoDB. (These segments are different from the rollback segment, which actually contains many tablespace segments.)

When a segment grows inside the tablespace, InnoDB allocates the first 32 pages to it one at a time. After that, InnoDB starts to allocate whole extents to the segment. InnoDB can add up to 4 extents at a time to a large segment to ensure good sequentiality of data.

Two segments are allocated for each index in InnoDB. One is for nonleaf nodes of the B-tree, the other is for the leaf nodes. Keeping the leaf nodes contiguous on disk enables better sequential I/O operations, because these leaf nodes contain the actual table data.

Some pages in the tablespace contain bitmaps of other pages, and therefore a few extents in an InnoDB tablespace cannot be allocated to segments as a whole, but only as individual pages.

When you ask for available free space in the tablespace by issuing a SHOW TABLE STATUS statement, InnoDB reports the extents that are definitely free in the tablespace. InnoDB always reserves some extents for cleanup and other internal purposes; these reserved extents are not included in the free space.

When you delete data from a table, InnoDB contracts the corresponding B-tree indexes. Whether the freed space becomes available for other users depends on whether the pattern of deletes frees individual pages or extents to the tablespace. Dropping a table or deleting all rows from it is guaranteed to release the space to other users, but remember that deleted rows are physically removed only by the purge operation, which happens automatically some time after they are no longer needed for transaction rollbacks or consistent reads. (See Section 14.5.3, “InnoDB Multi-Versioning”.)

To see information about the tablespace, use the Tablespace Monitor. See Section 14.17, “InnoDB Monitors”.

How Pages Relate to Table Rows

The maximum row length, except for variable-length columns (VARBINARY, VARCHAR, BLOB and TEXT), is slightly less than half of a database page. That is, the maximum row length is about 8000 bytes. LONGBLOB and LONGTEXT columns must be less than 4GB, and the total row length, including BLOB and TEXT columns, must be less than 4GB.

If a row is less than half a page long, all of it is stored locally within the page. If it exceeds half a page, variable-length columns are chosen for external off-page storage until the row fits within half a page. For a column chosen for off-page storage, InnoDB stores the first 768 bytes locally in the row, and the rest externally into overflow pages. Each such column has its own list of overflow pages. The 768-byte prefix is accompanied by a 20-byte value that stores the true length of the column and points into the overflow list where the rest of the value is stored.

Making your log files very large may reduce disk I/O during checkpointing. It often makes sense to set the total size of the log files as large as the buffer pool or even larger. Although in the past large log files could make crash recovery take excessive time, starting with MySQL 5.5, performance enhancements to crash recovery make it possible to use large log files with fast startup after a crash. (Strictly speaking, this performance improvement is available for MySQL 5.1 with the InnoDB Plugin 1.0.7 and higher. It is with MySQL 5.5 that this improvement is available in the default InnoDB storage engine.)

How Checkpoint Processing Works

InnoDB implements a checkpoint mechanism known as fuzzy checkpointing. InnoDB flushes modified database pages from the buffer pool in small batches. There is no need to flush the buffer pool in one single batch, which would disrupt processing of user SQL statements during the checkpointing process.

During crash recovery, InnoDB looks for a checkpoint label written to the log files. It knows that all modifications to the database before the label are present in the disk image of the database. Then InnoDB scans the log files forward from the checkpoint, applying the logged modifications to the database.

InnoDB writes to its log files on a rotating basis. It also writes checkpoint information to the first log file at each checkpoint. All committed modifications that make the database pages in the buffer pool different from the images on disk must be available in the log files in case InnoDB has to do a recovery. This means that when InnoDB starts to reuse a log file, it has to make sure that the database page images on disk contain the modifications logged in the log file that InnoDB is going to reuse. In other words, InnoDB must create a checkpoint and this often involves flushing of modified database pages to disk.

Random insertions into or deletions from a secondary index can cause the index to become fragmented. Fragmentation means that the physical ordering of the index pages on the disk is not close to the index ordering of the records on the pages, or that there are many unused pages in the 64-page blocks that were allocated to the index.

One symptom of fragmentation is that a table takes more space than it “should” take. How much that is exactly, is difficult to determine. All InnoDB data and indexes are stored in B-trees, and their fill factor may vary from 50% to 100%. Another symptom of fragmentation is that a table scan such as this takes more time than it “should” take:

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM t WHERE non_indexed_column <> 12345;

The preceding query requires MySQL to perform a full table scan, the slowest type of query for a large table.

To speed up index scans, you can periodically perform a “null” ALTER TABLE operation, which causes MySQL to rebuild the table:

ALTER TABLE tbl_name ENGINE=INNODB

Another way to perform a defragmentation operation is to use mysqldump to dump the table to a text file, drop the table, and reload it from the dump file.

If the insertions into an index are always ascending and records are deleted only from the end, the InnoDB filespace management algorithm guarantees that fragmentation in the index does not occur.

To reclaim operating system disk space when truncating an InnoDB table, the table must be stored in its own .ibd file. For a table to be stored in its own .ibd file, innodb_file_per_table must enabled when the table is created. Additionally, there cannot be a foreign key constraint between the table being truncated and other tables, otherwise the TRUNCATE TABLE operation fails. This is a change from previous behavior, which would transform the TRUNCATE operation to a DELETE operation that removes all rows and triggers ON DELETE operations on child tables. A foreign key constraint between two columns in the same table, however, is permitted.

When a table is truncated, it is dropped and re-created in a new .ibd file (previous versions of InnoDB would keep the existing .idb file), and the freed space is returned to the operating system. This is in contrast to truncating InnoDB tables that are stored within the InnoDB system tablespace (tables created when innodb_file_per_table=OFF), where only InnoDB can use the freed space after the table is truncated.

The ability to truncate tables and return disk space to the operating system also means that physical backups can be smaller. Truncating tables that are stored in the system tablespace (tables created when innodb_file_per_table=OFF) leaves blocks of unused space in the system tablespace.

With MySQL 5.5 and higher, or MySQL 5.1 with the InnoDB Plugin, creating and dropping secondary indexes for InnoDB tables is much faster than before. Historically, adding or dropping an index on a table with existing data could be very slow. The CREATE INDEX and DROP INDEX statements worked by creating a new, empty table defined with the requested set of indexes, then copying the existing rows to the new table one-by-one, updating the indexes as the rows are inserted. After all rows from the original table were copied, the old table was dropped and the copy was renamed with the name of the original table.

The performance speedup for fast index creation applies to secondary indexes, not to the primary key index. The rows of an InnoDB table are stored in a clustered index organized based on the primary key, forming what some database systems call an “index-organized table”. Because the table structure is so closely tied to the primary key, redefining the primary key still requires copying the data.

This new mechanism also means that you can generally speed the overall process of creating and loading an indexed table by creating the table with only the clustered index, and adding the secondary indexes after the data is loaded.

Although no syntax changes are required in the CREATE INDEX or DROP INDEX commands, some factors affect the performance, space usage, and semantics of this operation (see Section 14.13.6, “Limitations of Fast Index Creation”).

It is possible to create multiple indexes on a table with one ALTER TABLE statement. This is relatively efficient, because the clustered index of the table needs to be scanned only once (although the data is sorted separately for each new index). For example:

CREATE TABLE T1(A INT PRIMARY KEY, B INT, C CHAR(1)) ENGINE=InnoDB;
INSERT INTO T1 VALUES (1,2,'a'), (2,3,'b'), (3,2,'c'), (4,3,'d'), (5,2,'e');
COMMIT;
ALTER TABLE T1 ADD INDEX (B), ADD UNIQUE INDEX (C);

The above statements create table T1 with the clustered index (primary key) on column A, insert several rows, and then build two new indexes on columns B and C. If there were many rows inserted into T1 before the ALTER TABLE statement, this approach is much more efficient than creating all the secondary indexes before loading the data.

You can also create the indexes one at a time, but then the clustered index of the table is scanned (as well as sorted) once for each CREATE INDEX statement. Thus, the following statements are not as efficient as the ALTER TABLE statement above, even though neither requires recreating the clustered index for table T1.

CREATE INDEX B ON T1 (B);
CREATE UNIQUE INDEX C ON T1 (C);

Dropping InnoDB secondary indexes also does not require any copying of table data. You can equally quickly drop multiple indexes with a single ALTER TABLE statement or multiple DROP INDEX statements:

ALTER TABLE T1 DROP INDEX B, DROP INDEX C;

or:

DROP INDEX B ON T1;
DROP INDEX C ON T1;

Restructuring the clustered index in InnoDB always requires copying the data in the table. For example, if you create a table without a primary key, InnoDB chooses one for you, which may be the first UNIQUE key defined on NOT NULL columns, or a system-generated key. Defining a PRIMARY KEY later causes the data to be copied, as in the following example:

CREATE TABLE T2 (A INT, B INT) ENGINE=InnoDB;
INSERT INTO T2 VALUES (NULL, 1);
ALTER TABLE T2 ADD PRIMARY KEY (B);

When you create a UNIQUE or PRIMARY KEY index, InnoDB must do some extra work. For UNIQUE indexes, InnoDB checks that the table contains no duplicate values for the key. For a PRIMARY KEY index, InnoDB also checks that none of the PRIMARY KEY columns contains a NULL. It is best to define the primary key when you create a table, so you need not rebuild the table later.

InnoDB has two types of indexes: the clustered index and secondary indexes. Since the clustered index contains the data values in its B-tree nodes, adding or dropping a clustered index does involve copying the data, and creating a new copy of the table. A secondary index, however, contains only the index key and the value of the primary key. This type of index can be created or dropped without copying the data in the clustered index. Because each secondary index contains copies of the primary key values (used to access the clustered index when needed), when you change the definition of the primary key, all secondary indexes are recreated as well.

Dropping a secondary index is simple. Only the internal InnoDB system tables and the MySQL data dictionary tables are updated to reflect the fact that the index no longer exists. InnoDB returns the storage used for the index to the tablespace that contained it, so that new indexes or additional table rows can use the space.

To add a secondary index to an existing table, InnoDB scans the table, and sorts the rows using memory buffers and temporary files in order by the values of the secondary index key columns. The B-tree is then built in key-value order, which is more efficient than inserting rows into an index in random order. Because the B-tree nodes are split when they fill, building the index in this way results in a higher fill-factor for the index, making it more efficient for subsequent access.

While an InnoDB secondary index is being created or dropped, the table is locked in shared mode. Any writes to the table are blocked, but the data in the table can be read. When you alter the clustered index of a table, the table is locked in exclusive mode, because the data must be copied. Thus, during the creation of a new clustered index, all operations on the table are blocked.

A CREATE INDEX or ALTER TABLE statement for an InnoDB table always waits for currently executing transactions that are accessing the table to commit or roll back. ALTER TABLE statements that redefine an InnoDB primary key wait for all SELECT statements that access the table to complete, or their containing transactions to commit. No transactions whose execution spans the creation of the index can be accessing the table, because the original table is dropped when the clustered index is restructured.

Once a CREATE INDEX or ALTER TABLE statement that creates an InnoDB secondary index begins executing, queries can access the table for read access, but cannot update the table. If an ALTER TABLE statement is changing the clustered index for an InnoDB table, all queries wait until the operation completes.

A newly-created InnoDB secondary index contains only the committed data in the table at the time the CREATE INDEX or ALTER TABLE statement begins to execute. It does not contain any uncommitted values, old versions of values, or values marked for deletion but not yet removed from the old index.

Because a newly-created index contains only information about data current at the time the index was created, queries that need to see data that was deleted or changed before the index was created cannot use the index. The only queries that could be affected by this limitation are those executing in transactions that began before the creation of the index was begun. For such queries, unpredictable results could occur. Newer queries can use the index.

Although no data is lost if the server crashes while an ALTER TABLE statement is executing, the crash recovery process is different for clustered indexes and secondary indexes.

If the server crashes while creating an InnoDB secondary index, upon recovery, MySQL drops any partially created indexes. You must re-run the ALTER TABLE or CREATE INDEX statement.

When a crash occurs during the creation of an InnoDB clustered index, recovery is more complicated, because the data in the table must be copied to an entirely new clustered index. Remember that all InnoDB tables are stored as clustered indexes. In the following discussion, we use the word table and clustered index interchangeably.

MySQL creates the new clustered index by copying the existing data from the original InnoDB table to a temporary table that has the desired index structure. Once the data is completely copied to this temporary table, the original table is renamed with a different temporary table name. The temporary table comprising the new clustered index is renamed with the name of the original table, and the original table is dropped from the database.

If a system crash occurs while creating a new clustered index, no data is lost, but you must complete the recovery process using the temporary tables that exist during the process. Since it is rare to re-create a clustered index or re-define primary keys on large tables, or to encounter a system crash during this operation, this manual does not provide information on recovering from this scenario. Contact MySQL support.

Take the following considerations into account when creating or dropping InnoDB indexes: