MySQL has a unique feature whereby you can select the storage engine for each table. If you don’t know what a storage engine is, it is responsible for managing the physical data on disk - from data files and indexes to the memory buffers used to access the data and the locking needed to prevent multiple people from clobbering each other’s changes. This is both a boon and a bane for Systems Administrators and DBAs.
It’s a great feature because developers, Sys Admins and DBAs can select the engine with the properties they require. For example, the InnoDB engine supports ACID-compliant transactions, foreign keys and row-level locking. The MyISAM engine, while being lightning fast on reads and supporting concurrent inserts, does not have ACID-compliant transactions or foreign keys and implements table-level locking. Other engines are available, such as memory-based tables, clustered tables, federated tables (reference a table on server B …
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