I'm trying to figure out storage requirements for different storage engines. I have this table:
CREATE TABLE `mytest` (
`num1` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL,
KEY `key1` (`num1`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;
When I insert some values and then run show table status; I get the following:
+----------------+--------+---------+------------+---------+----------------+-------------+------------------+--------------+-----------+----------------+---------------------+---------------------+------------+-------------------+----------+----------------+---------+ | Name | Engine | Version | Row_format | Rows | Avg_row_length | Data_length | Max_data_length | Index_length | Data_free | Auto_increment | Create_time | Update_time | Check_time | Collation | Checksum | Create_options | Comment | +----------------+--------+---------+------------+---------+----------------+-------------+------------------+--------------+-----------+----------------+---------------------+---------------------+------------+-------------------+----------+----------------+---------+ | mytest | InnoDB | 10 | Compact | 1932473 | 35 | 67715072 | 0 | 48840704 | 4194304 | NULL | 2010-05-26 11:30:40 | NULL | NULL | latin1_swedish_ci | NULL | | |
Notice avg_row_length is 35. I am baffled that InnoDB would not make better use of space when I'm just storing a non-nullable integer.
I have run this same test on myISAM and by default myISAM uses 7 bytes per row on this table. When I run
ALTER TABLE mytest MAX_ROWS=50000000, AVG_ROW_LENGTH = 4;
causes myISAM to finally correctly use 5-byte rows.
When I run the same ALTER TABLE statement for InnoDB the avg_row_length does not change.
Why would such a large avg_row_length be necessary when only storing a 4-byte unsigned int?
InnoDB tables are clustered, that means that all data are contained in a B-Tree with the PRIMARY KEY as a key and all other columns as a payload.
Since you don't define an explicit PRIMARY KEY, InnoDB uses a hidden 6-byte column to sort the records on.
This and overhead of the B-Tree organization (with extra non-leaf-level blocks) requires more space than sizeof(int) * num_rows.