From the course: MySQL Installation and Configuration (2019)

MySQL storage engines overview

- [Instructor] MySQL supports different storage engines through a plugin system. A good selection of alternative storage engines are shipped with MySQL. The SQL statement SHOW ENGINES will give you a list of the engines that are installed on your system. The default storage engine is the InnoDB engine. This is the preferred engine for most purposes. It is fully acid compliant, supports transactions, rollbacks, role level locking, and non locking reads. The MyISAM engine is a legacy engine. This was the default engine before InnoDB. ISAM is indexed sequential access method. This engine is mostly used for legacy applications, and applications that require a smaller footprint. The memory engine is useful for temporary objects. It is fast and efficient, but not persistent. Memory stores data in RAM so it's fast but ethereal. The CSV engine uses comma separates values in a text file. CSV is comma separated values, a popular format for exchanging data between systems. The CSV engine can be useful for importing and exporting data in CSV format. The BLACKHOLE engine is like devnul on Unix. Everything you write to it disappears. This engine is rarely used alone. It can be a valuable part of a distributed system which doesn't hold local data. The Archive engine is used for storing data for archival purposes. This engine is not indexed, and is not optimized for performance at all. The MERGE_MYISAM engine logically groups a series of identical MYISAM tables and references them as one object. The merge engine is useful for data warehousing and other high volume, high availability applications. The performance schema engine is a special purpose engine designed for monitoring the performance of the server internally. It is not designed to be used outside of that specific purpose. The federated engine can link disparate MySQL installations without replication or clustering. A local federated table can automatically pull data from a remote server. No data is stored locally. The federated engine is not enabled by default. MySQL provides a good selection of database engines for a variety of use cases. For most purposes, the InnoDB engine will prove to be the best choice.

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