Storage Engines
MySQL supports several different storage engines that are used to handle different table types. The storage engine can be specified in the CREATE TABLE statement using the ENGINE keyword to tell MySQL how a table should be handled.
The default storage engine for MySQL is called MyISAM. Using this handler, tables are stored on disk in three files, with extensions .MYI, .MYD, and .frm. An alternative disk-based table handler is InnoDB, which supports some features that are not available in MyISAM such as transactions that you will learn about in Lesson 15. Support for InnoDB must be enabled at compile-time for your MySQL server.
The MEMORY storage engine is a very fast storage engine that stores tables in memory only. However, because ...
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