A forum dedicated to the InnoDB storage engine is available at http://forums.mysql.com/list.php?22.

Innobase Oy also hosts several forums, available at http://forums.innodb.com.

At the 2008 MySQL User Conference, Innobase announced availability of an InnoDB Plugin for MySQL. This plugin for MySQL exploits the “pluggable storage engine” architecture of MySQL, to permit users to replace the “built-in” version of InnoDB in MySQL 5.1.

As of MySQL 5.1.38, the InnoDB Plugin is included in MySQL 5.1 releases, in addition to the built-in version of InnoDB that has been included in previous releases. This version of the InnoDB Plugin is 1.0.4 and is considered of Beta quality.

The InnoDB Plugin offers new features, improved performance and scalability, enhanced reliability and new capabilities for flexibility and ease of use. Among the features of the InnoDB Plugin are “Fast index creation,” table and index compression, file format management, new INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables, capacity tuning, multiple background I/O threads, and group commit.

For information about these features, see the InnoDB Plugin Manual at http://www.innodb.com/products/innodb_plugin/plugin-documentation. For general information about using InnoDB in MySQL, see Section 13.6, “The InnoDB Storage Engine”.

The InnoDB Plugin is included in source and binary distributions, except RHEL3, RHEL4, SuSE 9 (x86, x86_64, ia64), and generic Linux RPM packages.

To use the InnoDB Plugin, you must disable the built-in version of InnoDB that is also included and instruct the server to use InnoDB Plugin instead. To accomplish this, use the following lines in your my.cnf file:

[mysqld]
ignore-builtin-innodb
plugin-load=innodb=ha_innodb_plugin.so

For the plugin-load option, innodb is the name to associate with the plugin and ha_innodb_plugin.so is the name of the shared object library that contains the plugin code. The extension of .so applies for Unix (and similar) systems. For HP-UX on HPPA (11.11) or Windows, the extension should be .sl or .dll, respectively, rather than .so.

If the server has problems finding the plugin when it starts up, specify the pathname to the plugin directory. For example, if plugins are located in the lib/mysql/plugin directory under the MySQL installation directory and you have installed MySQL at /usr/local/mysql, use these lines in your my.cnf file:

[mysqld]
ignore-builtin-innodb
plugin-load=innodb=ha_innodb_plugin.so
plugin_dir=/usr/local/mysql/lib/mysql/plugin

The previous examples show how to activate the storage engine part of InnoDB Plugin, but the plugin also implements several InnoDB-related INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables. (For information about these tables, see http://www.innodb.com/doc/innodb_plugin-1.0/innodb-information-schema.html.) To enable these tables, include additional name=library pairs in the value of the plugin-load option:

[mysqld]
ignore-builtin-innodb
plugin-load=innodb=ha_innodb_plugin.so
  ;innodb_trx=ha_innodb_plugin.so
  ;innodb_locks=ha_innodb_plugin.so
  ;innodb_cmp=ha_innodb_plugin.so
  ;innodb_cmp_reset=ha_innodb_plugin.so
  ;innodb_cmpmem=ha_innodb_plugin.so
  ;innodb_cmpmem_reset=ha_innodb_plugin.so

The plugin-load option value as shown here is formatted on multiple lines for display purposes but should be written in my.cnf using a single line without spaces in the option value. On Windows, substitute .dll for each instance of the .so extension.

After the server starts up, verify that InnoDB Plugin has been loaded by using the SHOW PLUGINS statement. For example, if you have loaded the storage engine and the INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables, the output should include lines similar to these:

mysql> SHOW PLUGINS;
+---------------------+--------+--------------------+---------------------...
| Name                | Status | Type               | Library             ...
+---------------------+--------+--------------------+---------------------...
...
| InnoDB              | ACTIVE | STORAGE ENGINE     | ha_innodb_plugin.so ...
| INNODB_TRX          | ACTIVE | INFORMATION SCHEMA | ha_innodb_plugin.so ...
| INNODB_LOCKS        | ACTIVE | INFORMATION SCHEMA | ha_innodb_plugin.so ...
| INNODB_CMP          | ACTIVE | INFORMATION SCHEMA | ha_innodb_plugin.so ...
| INNODB_CMP_RESET    | ACTIVE | INFORMATION SCHEMA | ha_innodb_plugin.so ...
| INNODB_CMPMEM       | ACTIVE | INFORMATION SCHEMA | ha_innodb_plugin.so ...
| INNODB_CMPMEM_RESET | ACTIVE | INFORMATION SCHEMA | ha_innodb_plugin.so ...
+---------------------+--------+--------------------+---------------------...

If you build MySQL from a source distribution, InnoDB Plugin is one of the storage engines that is built by default. Build MySQL the way you normally do; for example, by using the instructions at Section 2.10, “MySQL Installation Using a Source Distribution”. After the build completes, you should find the plugin shared object file under the storage/innodb_plugin directory, and make install should install it in the plugin directory. Configure MySQL to use InnoDB Plugin as described earlier for binary distributions.

If you use gcc, InnoDB Plugin cannot be compiled with gcc 3.x; you must use gcc 4.x instead.

InnoDB Hot Backup enables you to back up a running MySQL database, including InnoDB and MyISAM tables, with minimal disruption to operations while producing a consistent snapshot of the database. When InnoDB Hot Backup is copying InnoDB tables, reads and writes to both InnoDB and MyISAM tables can continue. During the copying of MyISAM tables, reads (but not writes) to those tables are permitted. In addition, InnoDB Hot Backup supports creating compressed backup files, and performing backups of subsets of InnoDB tables. In conjunction with MySQL’s binary log, users can perform point-in-time recovery. InnoDB Hot Backup is commercially licensed by Innobase Oy. For a more complete description of InnoDB Hot Backup, see http://www.innodb.com/hot-backup/features/ or download the documentation from http://www.innodb.com/doc/hot_backup/manual.html. You can order trial, term, and perpetual licenses from Innobase at http://www.innodb.com/hot-backup/order/.