dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/innodb-overview.html
Table of Contents 151 InnoDB Overview InnoDB provides MySQL with a transaction-safe (ACID compliant) storage engine that has commit, rollback, and crash recovery capabilities. InnoDB does locking on the row level and also provides an Oracle-style consistent non-locking read in SELECT statements. These features increase multi-user concurrency and performance. There is no need for lock escalation in InnoDB because row-level locks fit in very little space. You can freely mix InnoDB tables with tables from other MySQL storage engines, even within the same statement. InnoDB has been designed for maximum performance when processing large data volumes. Its CPU efficiency is probably not matched by any other disk-based relational database engine. Fully integrated with MySQL Server, the InnoDB storage engine maintains its own buffer pool for caching data and indexes in main memory. InnoDB stores its tables and indexes in a tablespace, which may consist of several files (or raw disk partitions). This is different from, for example, MyISAM tables where each table is stored using separate files. InnoDB tables can be of any size even on operating systems where file size is limited to 2GB.
InnoDB is used in production at numerous large database sites requiring high performance. stores over 1TB of data in InnoDB, and another site handles an average load of 800 inserts/updates per second in InnoDB. InnoDB is published under the same GNU GPL License Version 2 (of June 1991) as MySQL.
|