IUS is great repo which allows seamless integration of MySQL 5.1 and Python 2.6 into CentOS systems (which have 5.0 and 2.4 versions). The only issue is that if you run ‘SHOW ENGINES’ it will only show you MRG_MYISAM, CSV, FEDERATED, InnoDB, MEMORY, MyISAM engines. I wanted to experiment with ARCHIVE storage engine for storing raw input BI events, which is basically JSON. ARCHIVE engine seems to be a good hit for this – it supports compression (of our highly redundant data) and auto increment, which is necessary to implement queue-like processing, how it goes should be a topic for the separate post. So I was puzzled when I didn’t see archive storage engine in MySQL by IUS. Initial googling only suggested that ARCHIVE storage engine is enabled at compile time, which was pretty sad and I couldn’t understand why on the Earth had they omitted it. Later I found this post suggesting that ARCHIVE storage engine can be installed as plugin, and I need to install separate YUM packages. Finding for those packages in the current repo gave no results. So I finally found this bugreport revealing taht a few plugins are actually installed as a part of mysql51-server package and you only need to enable it! So I went a head and
mysql> INSTALL PLUGIN archive SONAME 'ha_archive.so';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.02 sec)
And then
mysql> show engines \G
*************************** 7. row ***************************
Engine: ARCHIVE
Support: YES
Comment: Archive storage engine
Transactions: NO
XA: NO
Savepoints: NO
7 rows in set (0.00 sec)
Voila!
The following plugins are installed into the OS but not into MySQL:
ha_archive.so - ARCHIVE
ha_blackhole.so - BLACKHOLE
ha_example.so - EXAMPLE
ha_innodb_plugin.so - InnoDB Plugin
Enjoy!
Update: Experiment on 24M rows shows 11X compression ratio! From 437 bytes/row in InnoDB (no indexes) down to 38 bytes per row.
Alexey's Random Notes 