Comparison of Storage Engine Features

Overview

In this tutorial, we will compare storage engine features. MySQL works with many storage engines to cater the needs of different applications. However, we will stick to common storage engines and a brief comparison of the features in this post.

Common Storage Engines

The most commonly used MySQL storage engines are as follows:

InnoDB
MyISAM
MEMORY

Comparison Chart

Let’s compare some important features of these storage engines.

	InnoDB	MyISAM	MEMORY
Purpose	Supports Transactions and Foreign Keys. Transactional storage engine with COMMIT/ROLLBACK	Supports Fast retrievals and applications with few updates.	In MEMORY data tables.
Usage	Fully ACID compliant transactions	Fastest for read heavy applications	In-memory storage
Locking	Row-level locking, Multi-versioning	Table-level locking Large-grain table locks, no non-locking reads	Large grain table locks
Durability	Durability recovery	Table recovery	No persistence or Disk I/O. Data is lost if the MySQL Server shuts down.
Indexing	B-tree indexes	B-tree/Full text/R-tree	Hash/B-tree indexes