Question asked by a student: is there a way to limit a table’s quote on disk? Say, limit a table to 2GB, after which it will refuse to grow? Note that the requirement is that rows are never DELETEd. The table must simply refuse to be updated once it reaches a certain size.

There is no built-in way to limit a table’s quota on disk. First thing to observe is that MySQL has nothing to do with this. It is entirely up to the storage engine to provide with such functionality. The storage engine is the one to handle data storage: how table and keys are stored on disk. Just consider the difference between MyISAM’s .MYD & .MYI to InnoDB’s shared tablespace ibdata1 to InnoDB’s file-per table .ibd files.

The only engine I know of that has a quota is the MEMORY engine: it