MySQL's main storage engines are InnoDB, the default, and MyISAM. A storage engine stores and reads a table's data, and you choose one per table. Oracle recommends InnoDB except for specialized cases.
- InnoDB: ACID transactions with crash recovery. It also locks rows, not tables, and enforces foreign keys.
- MyISAM: table-level locking, with no transactions or foreign keys, for read-mostly data.
- Memory, formerly HEAP: rows kept in RAM, very fast for single-value lookups, but lost at shutdown.
- Archive: compressed storage for archival data. It supports
INSERTandSELECT, but notUPDATEorDELETE. - CSV: rows stored as comma-separated text, for data exchange.
- Federated: remote MySQL tables used as local ones.
- NDB: the clustered engine of MySQL NDB Cluster.
SHOW ENGINES lists the engines your server supports. To check one table's engine:
SHOW TABLE STATUS WHERE Name = 'table_name';
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