I thought I should praise Innodb team for all the work they have been doing recently. We see a lot of cool stuff happening, especially in the area of our interest which is Performance And Scalability.
Innodb Plugin 1.0.4 had a lot of great performance improvements and 1.0.5/1.0.6 gets even further with long standing caching issues of large full table scan wiping off the cache. The Group Commit bug is also finally fixed now.
Innodb plugin documentation now seems to be merged with MySQL Documentation which makes it much more usable and Innodb Plugin is shipped with MySQL 5.1 which makes it much easier to use which means wider community testing.
Number of patches suggested by community such as Google and Percona were reworked and included in the plugin during latest months.
We can also see Innodb Plugin 1.0.5 is named Release Candidate which hopefully means it will be considered ready for general use – almost 2 years from the date of initial public release and probably 4 years since the work on Innodb plugin features such as compression or Online index creation has started.
About the Author
Peter ZaitsevPeter managed the High Performance Group within MySQL until 2006, when he founded Percona. Peter has a Master's Degree in Computer Science and is an expert in database kernels, computer hardware, and application scaling.
What is the major difference between innodb and innodb plugin?, Thought they both were build from the same code base.
The pluging is not built inside the MySQL database, you can update it without recompiling/updating your whole setup. You can test multiple plugins with different version too, ensuring maximum compatibility and stability.
It just seems innodb plugin has more feature / optimizations than the built-in innodb engine.
Now mysql ships with both innodb and innodb plugin, should innodb be considered stable release of innodb while innodb plugin is
newest version of innodb?
If they are both the same, I dont know why you would want to ship both.
I can see the whole idea about pluggable engines, where you dont have to patch mysql source code to install an experimental
or unofficial storage engine to mysql.
Kim,
MySQL 5.1 is “Stable” for quite a some time. The Innodb Plugin is a a lot of new code and simply replacing build in Innodb with plugin can compromise stability and surely introduce number of behavior changes which are not intended to happen in “Stable” release.
So giving the Option of easily enabling Innodb plugin in MySQL 5.1 is a great solution which allows people who value stability the most to stay using BuiltIn Innodb and people who like Features and Performance to use Innodb Plugin.
I would expect if Innodb plugin goes to “GA” state soon and proves working well in 5.1 series we will see BuiltIn Innodb replaced by Plugin in next major MySQL release.
The MySQL manual does contain some information about InnoDB Plugin, but the Plugin manual is not merged into the MySQL manual.
InnoDB Plugin has indeed replaced the built-in InnoDB in MySQL 5.4, as of 5.4.2:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.4/en/news-5-4-2.html
However, there were a number of configuration default value changes in early 5.4.x releases, so skip directly to the most recent of these, 5.4.3:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.4/en/news-5-4-3.html
Upcoming MySQL 5.5.0 also has InnoDB Plugin as the built-in InnoDB, and it will have InnoDB Plugin 1.0.5. (5.4.x has 1.0.4).
Thanks for clarification Paul,
At least I see much more documentation about plugin in the MySQL documentation.
peter,
Yes, we’re trying to improve the manual on that front. Thanks for noticing. 🙂
that means whoever wants more stability should use the builtin version and whoever wants better performance, ease of upgrade should use Innodb plugin.