Introduction

A couple of months ago I decided to give myself a refresher on the mechanics of InnoDB. Having a high level understanding of what’s going on under the hood can help provide the context needed in order to resolve issues you may encounter as well as assist you in ensuring that your MySQL instance is running efficiently. Everyone can stand to go back to basics every now and then, as it can help you pick up concepts that you may have missed the last time you researched the topic.

This time around I decided to give myself a refresher by re-reading the MySQL 5.6 reference manual, chapter 14, which covers the InnoDB engine. Despite having a wealth of documented knowledge and insights, I found that a lot of the points in the documentations were unclear, leading me to do more research and experimentation in order to get a bit of clarity on some of the specifics that I felt were missing. In order to help make the information …