InnoDB
Ranked 2 of 4 storage engines by recommenders
Fast MySQL storage engine, praised for point lookups and heavy data ingestion. Main caveat is that a poor primary key can slow queries.
Fast MySQL storage engine, praised for point lookups and heavy data ingestion. Main caveat is that a poor primary key can slow queries.
9 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 7
- criticize it
- 2
- approval share
- 78%
Recommended in 6 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 7 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 3.5 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 6 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Strong write and data ingest performance
“it solves the problem, because secondary non-unique index changes are buffered and written in batches”
Comment from 15 Dec 2025 in “Avoid UUID Version 4 Primary Keys in Postgres” “Innodb is really good at ingesting tons of data”
Comment from 28 Sep 2026 in “MongoDB CEO resigns to join Meta”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Clustered primary key can slow queries
“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”
Comment from 15 Dec 2025 in “Avoid UUID Version 4 Primary Keys in Postgres” “InnoDB's use of a clustered index for PK (has pros/cons, but better for some workloads)”
Comment from 4 Feb 2026 in “No More Hidden Changes: How MySQL 9.6 Transforms Foreign Key Management” Outperformed by TidesDB on a benchmark
“see TidesDB keeping up and even surpassing InnoDB on this very heavy benchmark”
Comment from 8 Oct 2026 in “A new write and space optimized storage engine for MySQL is here”
Other storage engines people recommend
The three most recommended other storage engines, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aether storage engine | 10 | 2 | 83% | 5 | — | Approved |
| InnoDBThis page | 7 | 2 | 78% | 6 | — | — |
| TidesDB | 6 | 0 | 100% | 5 | — | — |
| OrioleDB | 5 | 1 | 83% | 4 | — | — |
What people said
10 of the 11 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“the more I learn about InnoDB, the more I'm impressed”
“because InnoDB does sync compression and not async like TidesDB it's not performant”
“see TidesDB keeping up and even surpassing InnoDB on this very heavy benchmark”
“Innodb is really good at ingesting tons of data”
“InnoDB made different design than PG decisions and was (and perhaps still is) faster at point lookups.”
“As InnoDB demonstrates, you can take the undo log approach without having ORA-01555 style errors.”
“InnoDB's use of a clustered index for PK (has pros/cons, but better for some workloads)”
“pluggable engines (specifically InnoDB) are the only thing that”
“it solves the problem, because secondary non-unique index changes are buffered and written in batches”
“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”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.