Inserts at Drive Speed: Designing a Custom Storage Engine for Write-Mostly Applications

MySQL offers a variety of storage engines that can be matched to application requirements. Data can be integrated seamlessly between storage engines. When none of the existing engines look like a perfect match to your requirements, you can add your own. MySQL provides a SQL stack for your data. By leveraging the integration between storage engines, you are free to concentrate on just the design of key tables.

Writing a custom engine can seem intimidating and creating a generic engine can be. This storage engine provides fast, lock-free inserts and deletes into a read-only table with very low resource usage. We will discuss the problem addressed, why the approach was chosen, general storage engine design and API required to implement the design. We will talk about lessons learned implementing the storage engine to improve flexibility and performance.