# InnoDB

7 Hacker News commenters recommended InnoDB and 2 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 6 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Fast MySQL storage engine, praised for point lookups and heavy data ingestion. Main caveat is that a poor primary key can slow queries.

## Why people recommend it

- Strong write and data ingest performance (2 comments): "it solves the problem, because secondary non-unique index changes are buffered and written in batches" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46274959)) "Innodb is really good at ingesting tons of data" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49882036))

## What people warn about

- Clustered primary key can slow queries (2 comments): "A bad PK in some databases (InnoDB engine, SQL Server if clustered) can cause query times to go from sub-msec to tens of msec quite easily" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46274689)) "InnoDB's use of a clustered index for PK (has pros/cons, but better for some workloads)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46893543))
- Outperformed by TidesDB on a benchmark (1 comments): "see TidesDB keeping up and even surpassing InnoDB on this very heavy benchmark" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50000885))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Aether storage engine](https://hackerapproved.com/p/aether.md): 10 recommend
- [TidesDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tidesdb.md): 6 recommend
- [OrioleDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/orioledb.md): 5 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "InnoDB", https://hackerapproved.com/p/innodb/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).