Like any mature technology that is constantly evolving, MySQL has amassed a jargon of its own. Some of this terminology occasionally causes confusion, especially when two terms are similar, but actually refer to two completely different things.
This is particularly the case for the two storage engines InnoDB and NDB (which sound very alike when spoken aloud), and the two "Cluster" technologies: InnoDB Cluster and MySQL Cluster.
Let's see if we can clear this confusion up.
InnoDB is a storage engine - the software component that a database uses to read, write, update, and delete data and perform other fundamental operations. InnoDB replaced MyISAM as the default storage engine for MySQL in 2010, with the release of version 5.5 (largely because of its support for transactions and foreign keys) and is the best option for most workloads.
NDB (also known as NDBCLUSTER) is another …
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