Storage Engines
Table 5 lists some of the table types supported in most MySQL installations. For truly atomic database transactions, you should use InnoDB tables. New transactional storage engines are being introduced at the time of this writing, however.
Table 1-5. MySQL table types
Type | Transactional | Description |
|---|---|---|
ARCHIVE | No | Used for archiving databases without indexes in a very small footprint. |
BLACKHOLE | No | Stores no data at all. All queries return no rows. |
CSV | No | Stores data in comma-separated files. |
FALCON | Yes | New experimental, transactional storage engine to potentially replace InnoDB in a future release. |
INNODB | Yes | Transaction-safe tables with row locking. |
MEMORY (formerly HEAP) | No | Memory-based table; not persistent. |
MERGE | No | A collection of MyISAM tables merged as a single table. |
MYISAM | No | A newer, portable table type to replace ISAM. |
NDB | Yes | Clustered storage engine for MySQL Cluster. |
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