InnoDB Website

Plugin

The InnoDB Plugin for MySQL exploits the “pluggable storage engine” architecture of MySQL, to permit users to replace the “built-in” version of InnoDB in MySQL 5.1 with a new release of InnoDB that offers new features, improved performance and scalability, enhanced reliability and new capabilities for flexibility and ease of use. You can dynamically INSTALL the InnoDB Pugin to replace the built-in InnoDB within MySQL, and even “fall back” to standard InnoDB if you wish.

See the documentation for installation, functional details and usage information.

New Features in the InnoDB Plugin

• Performance and scalability enhancements

  • Faster locking for improved scalability on multi-core platforms; see here for details.
  • Ability to use more scalable platform memory allocators
  • Dynamic control of insert buffering, adaptive hash indexing, thread concurrency

• Fast index creation: add or drop indexes without copying the data
• Data compression: shrink tables, to significantly reduce storage and i/o
• New row format: fully off-page storage of long BLOB, TEXT, and VARCHAR columns
• File format management: protects upward and downward compatibility
• INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables: information about compression and locking
• Other changes for flexibility, ease of use and reliability

  • Dynamic control of many system configuration parameters
  • TRUNCATE TABLE re-creates the *.ibd file to reclaim space
  • “Strict mode” to prevent mistakes
  • Control over Optimizer Statistics Estimation
  • Better Error Handling When Dropping Indexes

About the InnoDB Plugin:

• Can be dynamically INSTALLed, without compiling from source or relinking MySQL
• Available here in source and binary (for most platforms)
• Licensed in open source (GPL V2)
• Available for MySQL 5.1.23 or later releases of 5.1
• Supports temporary use (can downgrade to standard InnoDB)
• Supported via forums.innodb.com.