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I'm looking for documentation on how MySQL stores data on disk, in particular InnoDB and MyISAM.

I took a database course back in college (and wrote a primitive database) so I have a general idea.

I could ask a bunch of questions here about how various types are stored in rows, and how rows are stored on disk, or go whole-hog and just describe my entire system in excruciating detail and ask for how to structure it, but I think simply learning how it stores records would let me figure it out by myself with a lot less bandwidth.

Is this documented anywhere (outside of the source code)?

Thanks!

Bill Karwin
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Ken
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  • Hmmm...do you mean how and where the files are physically written to the disk? Well, you're going to need to add at least a few semesters as a computer science major to fully grok that. There is some relevance with clustered indexes where the physical layout is configured and affect performance, but this is more about query analyzing. I can tell you that MySQL, as a RDBMS, stores MySQL tables as individual files, as opposed to MS SQL server and Oracle which tend to combine their database objects in files. Beyond that, the physical layout shouldn't concern you too much. It sounds like you might – tpow Dec 18 '09 at 23:13
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    I think its fairly clear that the OP wants to know about designs for physically storing data on disk and ideas related to persistence implementations. Database normalization isn't what he's asking about. – dgh Oct 20 '13 at 15:49
  • This might be a good place to start https://blog.jcole.us/2013/01/03/the-basics-of-innodb-space-file-layout/ – pucky124 Sep 12 '17 at 22:27

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