I have the following InnoDB configuration option in my.cnf:
innodb_file_per_table = 1
I'm populating a table with a few million rows, but after spending a few minutes inserting, MySQL produces the following error:
ERROR 1114 (HY000): The table is full
The .ibd filesize is exactly 629145600 bytes (yep, 600*2^20). The partition containing the MySQL data is not full.
Can anyone explain what's going on here?
This is not a limitation of InnoDB - both the docs for 5.0 and 5.6 state:
On some older operating systems, files must be less than 2GB
which in any case is a not a limitiation you are running into. The combined log files can also run up to 512 GB (for version 5.6, 4GB with 5.0). Something else seems to be placing a limitation on your files: virtualised system, partition (as Rahul mentions) etc.etc.
When inserting these records, innoDB creates numerous temporary files (in the directory specified by tmpdir in my.cnf). For me, this was set to /tmp, where I had approx 500MiB of free space. After increasing this available space (to around 1GiB) the error stopped occurring.
I tested this repeatedly by mounting a tmpfs with limited space on /tmp. With a different range of sizes I was able to get the .ibd file to a size larger than exactly 600MiB before receiving the 1114 error. 600MiB was so exact it's hard to think it was coincidence, but as far as I can tell it was.
I should point out that monitoring /tmp during the script reveals no indication of any use of it - df doesn't report its size as anywhere near full.