In the 5.6.4 release it is now possible to create an InnoDB database with 4k or 8k page sizes in addition to the original 16k page size. Previously, it could be done by recompiling the engine with a different value for UNIV_PAGE_SIZE_SHIFT and UNIV_PAGE_SIZE. With this release, you can set –innodb-page-size=n when starting mysqld, or put innodb_page_size=n in the configuration file in the [mysqld] section where n can be 4k, 8k, 16k, or 4096, 8192, 16384.

The support of smaller page sizes may be useful for certain storage media such as SSDs. Performance results can vary depending on your data schema, record size, and read/write ratio. But this provides you more options to optimize your performance.

When this new setting is used, the page size is set for all tablespaces used by that InnoDB instance. You can query the current value with;

SHOW VARIABLES LIKE ‘innodb_page_size’;
or
SELECT variable_value …

Indexes are a very important part of databases and are used frequently to speed up access to particular data item or items. So before working with indexes, it is important to understand how indexes work behind the scene and what is the data structure that is used to store these indexes, because unless you understand the inner working of an index, you will never be able to fully harness its power.

Let me just start off this post saying if you're not interested in InnoDB tablespace internals, then this might not be the post for you. :)

At any rate, whilst examining individual tablespace files (the .ibd file created when running with innodb_file_per_table option enabled) in their binary format, I noticed the initial page size for a individual tablespace did not appear to be 16k (as the default InnoDB page size is 16k).

Upon examining the actual binary data stored in the data file (just create a basic table and insert 10 rows), you can see data is written at the very beginning of the file (position 0).

One can also see data appearing at several (4) other places in this file.

I was trying to sync up what I was seeing with these InnoDB internals:

…