Transactions on InnoDB

The InnoDB full-text search capability is an exciting feature. The full-text search itself is generally useful to have in an RDBMS. If an application is using all InnoDB tables except for one that is used for full-text searches, now that last table can be switched to InnoDB. If putting the full-text data in a MyISAM table led to scalability problems, duplication, or a less-than-ideal schema design, now those issues can be addressed.

In this post, I’ll take you through some of the basics of setting up and querying an InnoDB FULLTEXT search index. I’ll leave the scalability and performance aspects to Jimmy’s and Vinay’s blog posts, and just use some toy-sized data for demonstration purposes.

Creating a Table with a Full-Text Search Index

The key component of this feature is an index of type FULLTEXT, applied to one or more columns of an InnoDB table.

In Jimmy’s post, he mentions some scalability considerations where you might create the table (including a special FTS_DOC_ID column), load the data, then create the FULLTEXT index afterward. For simplicity (and since the data volume is so small), I’ll create the table with the index in place, then load the data afterward.

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MySQL has a well-earned reputation for being easy-to-use and delivering performance and scalability. In previous versions, MyISAM was the default storage engine. In our experience, most users never changed the default settings. With MySQL 5.5, InnoDB becomes the default storage engine. Again, we expect most users will not change the default settings. But, because of InnoDB, the default settings deliver the benefits users expect from their RDBMS — ACID Transactions, Referential Integrity, and Crash Recovery. Lets explore how using InnoDB tables improves your life as a MySQL user, DBA, or developer.

Background

In the first years of MySQL growth, early web-based applications didn’t push the limits of concurrency and availability. In 2010, hard drive and memory capacity and the performance/price ratio have all gone through the roof. Users pushing the performance boundaries of MySQL care a lot about reliability and crash recovery. MySQL databases are big, busy, robust, distributed, and important.

InnoDB hits the sweet spot of these top user priorities. The trend of storage engine usage has shifted in favor of the more efficient InnoDB. With MySQL 5.5, the time is right to make InnoDB the default storage engine.

The Big Change

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What a busy week! Lots of MySQL 5.5 announcements that just happened to coincide with the MySQL Conference and Expo in Silicon Valley. Here are some highlights of the performance and scalability work that the InnoDB team was involved with.

A good prep for the week of news is the article Introduction to MySQL 5.5, which includes information about the major performance and scalability features. That article will lead you into the MySQL 5.5 manual for general features and the InnoDB 1.1 manual for performance & scalability info.

Then there were the conference presentations from InnoDB team members, which continued the twin themes of performance and scalability:

• InnoDB: Status, Architecture, and New Features: Slides, Rate / leave feedback
• InnoDB Plugin: Performance Features and Benchmarks: Slides, Rate / leave feedback
• What’s New in MySQL 5.5? Performance/Scale Unleashed!: Slides, Rate / leave feedback
• What’s New in MySQL 5.5?: Performance and Scalability Benchmarks: Slides, Rate / leave feedback
• Introduction to InnoDB Monitoring System and Resource & Performance Tuning: Slides, Rate / leave feedback
• Backup Strategies with InnoDB Hot Backup: Slides, Rate / leave feedback

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The InnoDB Plugin manual is now available on the MySQL web site.