MySQL pluggable Storage Engines (SE)

One of the big advantages of MySQL is its concept of Pluggable Storage Engines. This means you can choose the most optimal Storage Engine for your needs. This also has a disadvantage: You have to know what you are doing...

If you need some help deciding which is the right Storage Engine or even strategy for you or if you want us to make an independent and vendor neutral comparison of those Storage Engines consider our FromDual Consulting Services!

MySQL provides the following storage engines:

mysql> SHOW ENGINES;

+------------+----------+-------------------------------------------------------+
| Engine     | Support  | Comment                                               |
+------------+----------+-------------------------------------------------------+
| ARCHIVE    | YES      | Archive storage engine                                |
| BerkeleyDB | NO       | Transactional storage engine with page-level locking  |
| BLACKHOLE  | YES      | /dev/null storage engine for replication transmission |
| CSV        | YES      | CSV storage engine                                    |
| EXAMPLE    | YES      | Example storage engine                                |
| Falcon     | YES      | Falcon storage engine                                 |
| FEDERATED  | YES      | Federated MySQL storage engine (like database links)  |
| InnoDB     | YES      | Transactional storage engine with row-level locking   |
| ISAM       | NO       | Obsolete storage engine                               |
| MEMORY     | YES      | Hash based in memory tables                           |
| MRG_MYISAM | YES      | Collection of identical MyISAM tables (MERGE)         |
| MyISAM     | DEFAULT  | Default engine with great performance                 |
| ndbcluster | DISABLED | Clustered, fault-tolerant, memory-based tables        |
+------------+----------+-------------------------------------------------------+

Comments

Storage Engine	Comment
BerkeleyDB	Discontinued Storage Engine.
Falcon	Its future is uncertain at the moment.
FEDERATED	Currently disabled by default (no GA quality).
ISAM	Discontinued Storage Engine. Should not be used any more. Use MyISAM instead.
Aria (ex. Maria)	Seems to have no future within MySQL. See 3rd party providers and MariaDB.
MRG_MYISAM	Should not be used any more. Use partitioning option (MySQL 5.1) instead.

3^rd party Storage Engine providers

If you think some of the information below is inappropriate or missing please let us know!

There are also many independent Storage Engine providers:

Provider	Engine	State	Platforms	License	Release	Features
Antony T Curtis	Amira SE	Discontinued?		GPL v2		Transactional Storage Engine MySQL based upon the NuSphere Gemini Storage Engine.
Monty Program AB	Aria SE	GA	Linux, Solaris, Windows, etc.	GPL v2		Crash Safe MySQL Storage Engine. Successor of MyISAM.
Alex Esterkin	Ariella SE	pre-Alpha		GPL v2	Discontinued?	Global transaction and lock management, as well as transactional elastic provisioning and de-provisioning. The intended use cases: (1) transactional elastic data fabric in a cloud; (2) transaction monitor for cloud computing.
Amazon	AWS S3	Beta			v0.06 (Apr 2007?)	Makes the Amazon AWS S3 Simple Storage Service available as tables and rows in MySQL. This gives MySQL applications simple access to S3's worldwide distributed highly-available disaster-resistant storage and distribution system. Keep big slow blobs "out-line" to join against fast local tables. Solves the "Image Server Problem". Gives an entire CMS in SQL.
Softmethod GmbH	BlackRay			GPL v2	v0.10	The BlackRay Storage Engine is a fully relational database system designed to offer performance features commonly associated with search engines. It offers SQL support, JDBC and ODBC driver options.
Toru Maesaka	BlitzDB SE			GPL v2		Highly efficient general purpose use DB. Non-transactional competition to MyISAM and MEMORY engines. Developed with Drizzle.
OblakSoft	ClouSE	Beta	Linux	Proprietary	v1.0	ClouSE provides fully functional, transactional and ACID-compliant relational data management on top of cloud storage such as Amazon S3 (that may provide only basic capabilities and eventual consistency guarantees). ClouSE implements data encryption to provide full data confidentiality in the cloud, so cloud storage can be "plugged into" MySQL in a seamless and secure manner.
DDE	Distributed Data Engine	Alpha		GPL	v0.2	Revision of data is a mandatory task for any high security data. Creating revisions on database objects uses up many software development resources and is error prone. This engine will give database administrators the possibility to create a table that is versioned automatically. The Distributed Data Engine is an Open Source project that is dedicated to provide a Storage Engine for distributed data according to workload statistics. There are two main use cases for the engine. The first one is to reduce the network traffic by distributing the data according to where the data will be needed next. The other is to speed up full table scans by equally distributing the data among all servers using the I/O throughput of the all nodes plus evaluating the WHERE clauses before all data is merged in one node on the single node.
InfoBright	BrightHouse	GA	Linux and Windows	Proprietary (IEE) and OSS (ICE)?	v3.5	Data warehouse (DWH) data compression.
FederatedX	FederatedX	Beta		GPL	v0.4	FederatedX Pluggable Storage Engine for MySQL is based off of the Federated Storage Engine, and is an attempt to moved the Federated Storage Engine forward to fix bugs, add new features and develop new concepts that are easier to achieve as a pluggable storage engine.
Domas M.	FIFO SE
IBM	IBMDB2I	GA	AS400, i5/OS	Proprietary		DB2 interface for DB2 on i5/OS (AS400)
Calpont	InfiniDB	GA	Linux	GPL v2/Commercial	v1.0.3, v1.1a	InfiniDB is a scalable data warehousing (DWH) storage engine for MySQL. It is a column-oriented RDBMS primarily designed to handle the following application scenarios: Data warehouses, data marts, and other business intelligence (BI) / analytic databases, general purpose reporting databases, read-intensive segments of an overall application where read/search/lookup portions of the application are served by an analytic/query database and the transactional segments (e.g. order entry, etc.) are managed by a traditional relational database.
mdbtools	mdbtools	pre-Alpha		GPL		A pluggable storage engine that allows read-only access to MicroSoft Access .mdb database files.
NitroSecurity	NitroEDB	GA?		Proprietary		High-performance.
Thinking Networks	not available	Planning		GPL		Multidimensional Storage Engine.
Nomura	OpenOLAP	Beta	Linux	LGPL	v1.0 for MySQL 5.0.x, 2006-04-26, stalled since 2006?	OLAP cube tool, data warehouse (DWH).
Open Query	OQGRAPH	RC	Linux	GPLv2+/Proprietary		The GRAPH engine is a computation engine allowing hierarchies and more complex graph structures to be handled in a relational fashion. In a nutshell, tree structures and friend-of-a-friend style searches can now be done using standard SQL syntax, and results joined onto other tables.
PrimeBase	PBXT	Release Candidate (RC)	Linux, OS X, Windows	GPL	v1.0.11-6 (pre-GA), v1.5.02 (beta), v2.0 (early development release)	PrimeBase XT (PBXT) is a pluggable, transactional storage engine for MySQL. It uses a unique "write-once", log-based update strategy and MVCC (multi-version concurrency control) to provide optimal performance over a wide range of tasks.
PrimeBase	PBMS	Alpha	Linux, OS X	GPL	v1.0-alpha for MySQL 5.1.19	The BLOB Streaming daemon for MySQL, the PrimeBase Media Streaming daemon (PBMS), allows you to upload and download BLOB data to and from a MySQL or Drizzle database using HTTP. For this purpose, the PBMS daemon includes a lightweight HTTP server.
3L Tools	Q4M	Production Ready		GPL	v0.9.4	Q4M (Queue for MySQL) is a message queue that works as a pluggable storage engine of MySQL 5.1, designed to be robust, fast, flexible.
RethinkDB	RethinkDB	Alpha	Linux	Freeware/Proprietary	v0.1	MySQL Storage Engine for Solid State Disks (SSD)
RitmarkFS	RitmarkFS	Alpha	Linux, Windows	GPL	v0.4.1, 2006-11-21	RitmarkFS is a MySQL Data Storage engine that allows one to access and manipulate file-system using SQL queries. RitmarkFS also supports file-system replication and directory change tracking.
IBM (Solid)	solidDB	GA	Linux 32-bit, Linux 64-bit, Windows	GPL	v5.0.41-0073 2007-06-11	In memory database. Purchased by IBM. Turbo-charged version of MySQL database that leverages solidDB Storage Engine to support heavy transaction volumes and large numbers of concurrent users.
InnoBase (Oracle)	InnoDB					Plugable InnoDB storage engine
Kickfire	KFDB	GA		Proprietary		Column store + Compression + SQL-Chip, Applicance with a MySQL pluggable Storage Engine (for data warehouse (DWH)). Costs: USD 32k
Brian Aker	MemCacheD SE	Alpha		GPL		Memcache storage engine for MySQL
J. Schlüters	PHP SE			Simplified BSD License		MySQL Storage engine using embedded PHP
RRD Storage engine						(insider information, unofficial name, not yet available). A work around you can find here: Round-Robin Database Storage Engine (RRD)
ScaleDB	ScaleDB	GA		Proprietary		A scalable transactional storage engine for OLTP / data warehouse (DWH) (RAC for MySQL!).
Sphinx Search	SphinxSE	GA	Linux, Windows	GPL v2	0.9.9 (GA), v1.10-beta	External fulltext search engine accessible from MySQL. Scales pretty well.
Spider	SpiderSE	GA		GPL v2	GA: v1.0, v2.24-dev	A sharding Storage Engine. Supports XA and partitioning.
Tokutek	TokuDB	GA		Proprietary	v4.1	TokuDB is a MySQL Storage Engine that incorporates Fractal Tree technology. It enhances scalability and performance, increasing per-node performance by 10x-50x. TokuDB is a true software-only Storage Engine plugin, maximizing compatibility with existing MySQL code and applications.
Bearfoot Software	VEMySQL	Discontinued?			v1.5	Velocity Storage Engine: Small Footprint Database-Engine for MySQL.
Kentoku SHIBA	Vertical Partitioning SE (VPSE)	Alpha		GPL v2	Ancestor of Spider SE?	Merges tables for vertical partitioning and joins by primary key.
TangentOrg / Brian Aker	Web Service Engine	Alpha		GPL	Discontinued?	myhttp is a basic web service engine for MySQL. It all you to perform basic HTTP method operations, like PUT, GET, and DELETE from MySQL as though it was a table.
Jan Kneschke	Wormhole SE			GPL v2		Scriptable storage engine for MySQL. It allows you to map everything that can be accessed in a table fashion into MySQL. Datatypes, Indexing, ... everything is exposed. Currently it supports Lua as scripting language, but other languages can be added later.
Percona	XtraDB	GA	Linux, Windows	GPL v2	v12.5	Drop-in replacement for InnoDB with focus on performance and scalability.
Monti Program AB	Cassandra Storage Engine	Dev.	Linux	GPL		The Apache Cassandra database is for scalability and high availability without compromising performance. Linear scalability and proven fault-tolerance on commodity hardware are further features. Cassandra's support for replicating across multiple datacenters, id providing lower latency for your users and can survive regional outages.
Provider	Engine	State	Platforms	License	Release	Features