Do Storage Engines Make a Difference?

Some may wonder if the different storage engines really make a difference in terms of performance,

storage use, etc. As just a simple example, the Archive storage engine of MySQL is designed to efficiently

handle large volumes of inserts and compress data down to a small footprint. Below is an example of the difference in INSERT performance that can be had by simply using the Archive storage engine over two other popular MySQL storage engines:

The Archive storage engine has 50% more INSERT throughput over MyISAM (MySQL’s default storage

engine) and 255% more than InnoDB (A third party transactional storage engine owned by Oracle).

In addition, an identically structured 11 million row table takes up 1GB of space if InnoDB is used, 795MB if

MyISAM is used, but only 148MB if the Archive storage engine is used. As such a simple example shows,

storage engines in MySQL can make a difference in data warehousing applications.

Next let’s quickly profile internal MySQL storage engines (those developed internally by MySQL AB) as well

as third-party storage engines that can be used for data warehousing.