Optimizing mySQL database on large table with frequent writes and fulltext columns? - mysql

My team runs a shopping information site and as we've started to grow, we're starting to experience issues with query response time on our product table impacting display speed.
The main issue we experience is when a user "saves" an item triggering an update query as other users are searching on the FULLTEXT indexes that exist as well:
UPDATE product SET listed = listed+1 WHERE product_id = XX
For example, I just ran the update in 0.01 seconds with no other queries hitting but a few minutes ago, with a large FULLTEXT request also going, the same request took 23 seconds.
I assume this is because the table is MYISAM and can't do row-level locks.
Our product table contains over 3.5 million records and will double by the end of the month. After that it should level off to 2-5% monthly increases.
CREATE TABLE product (
product_id INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
category_id INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
title VARCHAR (100) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
short_desc VARCHAR (255) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
description TEXT NOT NULL,
msrp DECIMAL (6,2) NOT NULL DEFAULT '000.00',
rating DECIMAL(3,2) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0.0',
reviews INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
listed INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
sku VARCHAR(75) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
upc VARCHAR(20) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
updateddate DATETIME NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (product_id),
KEY title (title),
KEY category_id (category_id),
KEY listed (listed),
KEY mfrg_id (mfrg_id),
KEY identifier (identifier),
FULLTEXT INDEX (title),
FULLTEXT INDEX (description)
) ENGINE = MYISAM;
The database runs on a dedicated server that only hosts our site. We are planning to move the database into a replication structure with a Dual Proc, 16gb RAM server for the query box [slave] and the current "web" server handling the writes [dual proc, 4gb ram].
I'm not DB expert [clearly] and from researching have become warry of running InnoDB at the same time as MYISAM [replication & backup implications?] but it does seem like splitting the product table to house main information [innodb] and the fulltext descriptions [myisam] seperately may help dramatically?
If you have an idea and need more info please comment and I will provide back more details.
Thank you

You're exact about MyIsam. It's table-lock instead of row-lock like innoDB.
So from what you say, the query (full text) is taking a lot of time, so the update need to wait before being done.
You should really consider to switch to innoDB ( easy solution ) or switch your full text search to somewhere else like solr , elastic search, sphinx.
Also, you should check your slow_query log and optimize all those query.

Related

Multi-Table MariaDB Database Partitioning Solution

Looking for some guidance on how to best tackle partitioning on some database tables for the purpose of archiving/deleting data over a certain age. The main reason for this is to resolve some issues in database size.
You can think of the data akin to telemetry data where is is growing over time, but once it enters the database it doesn't change outside of the first 10-15 minutes in the event there is any form of conflicting data that requires the application to update a recent record (max 15 mins).
Current database size is approaching 500GB and is sitting on NVMe storage across a 3x Node Galera cluster in three cities. Backups are becoming increasingly larger and if an SST is needed between nodes this can take a couple of hours to complete which is less than ideal.
The plan to deal with this is by way of archiving, where we plan to off-board historical data to another server (say once a year) with slower storage that can then be backed up once and won't change for 12 months. The historical data will be rarely accessed, and in the event it is our application will handle querying the archive server if older than a certain date instead of the production servers that are relied on heavily for "recent" data.
We have 3x tables per customer, and they reference each other in a sort of heirarchy. There are no foreign keys in the tables, but they do hold references to one another and are used in JOIN queries. Eg. summary table is the top of the hierarchy and holds one record per "event". Under this is the details table and there could be 1-10 detail records sitting under the summary event. Under details is the digits table that could include 0-10 records per detailed record.
CREATE TABLE data below;
CREATE TABLE `summary_X` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`start_utc` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
`end_utc` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
`total_duration` smallint(6) DEFAULT NULL,
`legs` tinyint(4) DEFAULT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
KEY `start_utc` (`start_utc`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB
CREATE TABLE `details_X` (
`xid` bigint(20) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`id` int(11) NOT NULL,
`duration` smallint(6) DEFAULT NULL,
`start_utc` timestamp NULL DEFAULT NULL,
`end_utc` timestamp NULL DEFAULT NULL,
`event` varchar(2) DEFAULT NULL,
`event_time` smallint(6) DEFAULT NULL,
`event_a` varchar(7) DEFAULT NULL,
`event_b` varchar(7) DEFAULT NULL,
`ani` varchar(20) DEFAULT NULL,
`dnis` varchar(10) DEFAULT NULL,
`first_time` varchar(30) DEFAULT NULL,
`final_time` varchar(30) DEFAULT NULL,
`digits_count` int(2) DEFAULT 0,
`sys_a` varchar(3) DEFAULT NULL,
`sys_b` varchar(3) DEFAULT NULL,
`log_id_a` varchar(12) DEFAULT NULL,
`seq_a` varchar(1) DEFAULT NULL,
`log_id_b` varchar(12) DEFAULT NULL,
`seq_b` varchar(1) DEFAULT NULL,
`assoc_log_id_a` varchar(12) DEFAULT NULL,
`assoc_log_id_b` varchar(12) DEFAULT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`xid`),
KEY `start_utc` (`start_utc`),
KEY `end_utc` (`end_utc`),
KEY `event_a` (`event_a`),
KEY `event_b` (`event_b`),
KEY `id` (`id`),
KEY `final_digits` (`final_digits`),
KEY `log_id_a` (`log_id_a`),
KEY `log_id_b` (`log_id_b`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB
CREATE TABLE `digits_X` (
`id` bigint(20) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`leg_id` bigint(20) DEFAULT NULL,
`sequence` int(2) NOT NULL,
`digits` varchar(30) DEFAULT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
KEY `digits` (`digits`),
KEY `leg_id` (`leg_id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB
My first thought was to partition on Year, sounds easy enough but we don't have a date column on the digits table, so records here could be orphaned away from their mapped details record and no longer match in a JOIN on the archive server.
We then can also have a similar issue with summary and the timestamps on the "details" records could span multiple years. Eg. Summary event starts at 2021-12-31 23:55:00. First detail record is same timestamp, and then the next detail under the same event could be 2022-01-01 00:11:00. If 2021 partition was archived off to the other server, the 2022 detail would be orphaned and no longer JOIN to the 2021 summary event.
One alternative could be not to partition at all and do SELECT/INSERT/DELETE which isn't practical with the volume of data. Some tables have 30M-40M rows per year so this would be very resource taxing. There are also 400+ customers each with their own sets of tables.
Another I thought of was to add a column to the three tables as a "Year" column we can partition on but would include the Year of first event across all, so all related records can be on the same partitions/server, but this seems like a waste of space and there should be a better way.
Any thoughts or guidance would be appreciated.
To add PARTITIONing will require copying the entire table over. That will involve downtime and disk space. If you can live with that, then...
PARTITION BY RANGE(...) where the expression involves, say, TO_DAYS(...) or possibly TO_SECONDS(...). Then set up cron jobs to add a new partition periodically. (There is nothing automated for such.) And to detach the oldest partition. See Partition for a discussion of the details. (TO_DAYS avoids the need for a 'year' column.)
Note that Partitioning is implemented as several sub-tables under a table. With "transportable tablespaces", you can detach a partition from the big table, turning it into a table unto itself. At that point, you are free to move it to another server of something.
In a situation like yours, I might consider the following.
Write the raw data to a file (perhaps one per day) for archiving;
Insert into a table that will live only briefly; this will be purged by some means frequently;
Update "normalization" tables
"Summarize" the data into Summary Tables, where each set of rows covers one hour (or whatever makes sense).
Write "reports" from the summary table(s).
Be aware that each Partition takes an extra 5.5MB (average), so do not make many partitions. Or do you need only 2, each containing 15 minutes' data?
Meanwhile, I would look carefully at the schema. Can an INT (4 bytes) be turned into a SMALLINT (2 bytes). Can more things be Normalized.
digits_count int(2) -- that is a 4-byte INT; the (2) has no meaning and has been removed in MySQL 8. (MariaDB may follow suit someday.) It sounds like you need only a 1-byte TINYINT UNSIGNED (range: 0..255).
Since this is log info, be aware of Daylight Savings wrt DATETIME. (One hour per year is missing; another hour repeats.) This problem does not occur with TIMESTAMP. Each one takes 5 bytes (unless you include fractional seconds.)
(I can't advise on unnecessary indexes without seeing the queries.) SHOW TABLE STATUS will tell you how much space is being consumed by all the indexes.
Are the 3 tables of similar size?
Re "orphaning" -- You need at least 2 partitions -- one being filled (0-100% full) and an older partition (100% full)
"30M-40M rows per year" times 400 customers. Does that add up to 500 rows inserted per second? Are they INSERTed one row at a time? High speed ingestion
Are there more deletes and selects than inserts? And/or do they involve more than single rows? (I'm fishing for more info go help with some other issues you either have or are threatening to have.) Even with Deletes and no Partitioning, the disk growth will slow down as free space is generated, then reused. ("Rince and repeat.")
Without partitioning, see Huge Deletes . But... DELETEing data from a table does not shrink it disk footprint. However if each 'customer' has 1/400th of the data; and (of course) you do each customer separately, then there may not be any disk problem
I've given you a lot to think about. Answer some of my questions; I may have more advice.

Longest MySQL queries for worst case testing

I have a big mysql Database (planned is about one million entries) and I want to test its performance by creating a worst query (longest calculation time) i am able to.
For now it is a database with two tables:
CREATE TABLE user (ID BIGINT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
createdAt DATETIME NULL DEFAULT NULL,
lastAction DATETIME NULL DEFAULT NULL,
ip TEXT NULL DEFAULT NULL,
browser TEXT NULL DEFAULT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (ID))
CREATE TABLE evt (ID BIGINT AUTO_INCREMENT,
UID BIGINT NULL DEFAULT NULL,
timeStamp DATETIME NULL DEFAULT NULL,
name TEXT NULL DEFAULT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (ID),
FOREIGN KEY (UID)
REFERENCES user(ID))
It's populated and is running locally so no connection is required.
Are there any rules of Thumb on how to create horrible queries?
My worst query for now was:
SELECT user.browser, evt.name, count(*) as AmountOfActions
FROM evt
JOIN user ON evt.UID = user.ID
GROUP BY user.browser, evt.name
ORDER BY AmountOfActions DESC
The number one cost in a query is disk hits. So, make a table big enough so that it cannot be cached in RAM. And/or do a cross-join (etc) such that an intermediate table is too big to be cached in RAM.
A common problem on this forum is lots of joins followed by a group by. Or lots of joins, plus an order by on the big intermediate result.
Here's a double-whammy -- join two tables (each too big to be cached) on a UUID.

MySql - Handle table size and performance

We are having a Analytics product. For each of our customer we give one JavaScript code, they put that in their web sites. If a user visit our customer site the java script code hit our server so that we store this page visit on behalf of this customer. Each customer contains unique domain name.
we are storing this page visits in MySql table.
Following is the table schema.
CREATE TABLE `page_visits` (
`domain` varchar(50) DEFAULT NULL,
`guid` varchar(100) DEFAULT NULL,
`sid` varchar(100) DEFAULT NULL,
`url` varchar(2500) DEFAULT NULL,
`ip` varchar(20) DEFAULT NULL,
`is_new` varchar(20) DEFAULT NULL,
`ref` varchar(2500) DEFAULT NULL,
`user_agent` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
`stats_time` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
`country` varchar(50) DEFAULT NULL,
`region` varchar(50) DEFAULT NULL,
`city` varchar(50) DEFAULT NULL,
`city_lat_long` varchar(50) DEFAULT NULL,
`email` varchar(100) DEFAULT NULL,
KEY `sid_index` (`sid`) USING BTREE,
KEY `domain_index` (`domain`),
KEY `email_index` (`email`),
KEY `stats_time_index` (`stats_time`),
KEY `domain_statstime` (`domain`,`stats_time`),
KEY `domain_email` (`domain`,`email`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 |
We don't have primary key for this table.
MySql server details
It is Google cloud MySql (version is 5.6) and storage capacity is 10TB.
As of now we are having 350 million rows in our table and table size is 300 GB. We are storing all of our customer details in the same table even though there is no relation between one customer to another.
Problem 1: For few of our customers having huge number of rows in table, so performance of queries against these customers are very slow.
Example Query 1:
SELECT count(DISTINCT sid) AS count,count(sid) AS total FROM page_views WHERE domain = 'aaa' AND stats_time BETWEEN CONVERT_TZ('2015-02-05 00:00:00','+05:30','+00:00') AND CONVERT_TZ('2016-01-01 23:59:59','+05:30','+00:00');
+---------+---------+
| count | total |
+---------+---------+
| 1056546 | 2713729 |
+---------+---------+
1 row in set (13 min 19.71 sec)
I will update more queries here. We need results in below 5-10 seconds, will it be possible?
Problem 2: The table size is rapidly increasing, we might hit table size 5 TB by this year end so we want to shard our table. We want to keep all records related to one customer in one machine. What are the best practises for this sharding.
We are thinking following approaches for above issues, please suggest us best practices to overcome these issues.
Create separate table for each customer
1) What are the advantages and disadvantages if we create separate table for each customer. As of now we are having 30k customers we might hit 100k by this year end that means 100k tables in DB. We access all tables simultaneously for Read and Write.
2) We will go with same table and will create partitions based on date range
UPDATE : Is a "customer" determined by the domain? Answer is Yes
Thanks
First, a critique if the excessively large datatypes:
`domain` varchar(50) DEFAULT NULL, -- normalize to MEDIUMINT UNSIGNED (3 bytes)
`guid` varchar(100) DEFAULT NULL, -- what is this for?
`sid` varchar(100) DEFAULT NULL, -- varchar?
`url` varchar(2500) DEFAULT NULL,
`ip` varchar(20) DEFAULT NULL, -- too big for IPv4, too small for IPv6; see below
`is_new` varchar(20) DEFAULT NULL, -- flag? Consider `TINYINT` or `ENUM`
`ref` varchar(2500) DEFAULT NULL,
`user_agent` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL, -- normalize! (add new rows as new agents are created)
`stats_time` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
`country` varchar(50) DEFAULT NULL, -- use standard 2-letter code (see below)
`region` varchar(50) DEFAULT NULL, -- see below
`city` varchar(50) DEFAULT NULL, -- see below
`city_lat_long` varchar(50) DEFAULT NULL, -- unusable in current format; toss?
`email` varchar(100) DEFAULT NULL,
For IP addresses, use inet6_aton(), then store in BINARY(16).
For country, use CHAR(2) CHARACTER SET ascii -- only 2 bytes.
country + region + city + (maybe) latlng -- normalize this to a "location".
All these changes may cut the disk footprint in half. Smaller --> more cacheable --> less I/O --> faster.
Other issues...
To greatly speed up your sid counter, change
KEY `domain_statstime` (`domain`,`stats_time`),
to
KEY dss (domain_id,`stats_time`, sid),
That will be a "covering index", hence won't have to bounce between the index and the data 2713729 times -- the bouncing is what cost 13 minutes. (domain_id is discussed below.)
This is redundant with the above index, DROP it:
KEY domain_index (domain)
Is a "customer" determined by the domain?
Every InnoDB table must have a PRIMARY KEY. There are 3 ways to get a PK; you picked the 'worst' one -- a hidden 6-byte integer fabricated by the engine. I assume there is no 'natural' PK available from some combination of columns? Then, an explicit BIGINT UNSIGNED is called for. (Yes that would be 8 bytes, but various forms of maintenance need an explicit PK.)
If most queries include WHERE domain = '...', then I recommend the following. (And this will greatly improve all such queries.)
id BIGINT UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
domain_id MEDIUMINT UNSIGNED NOT NULL, -- normalized to `Domains`
PRIMARY KEY(domain_id, id), -- clustering on customer gives you the speedup
INDEX(id) -- this keeps AUTO_INCREMENT happy
Recommend you look into pt-online-schema-change for making all these changes. However, I don't know if it can work without an explicit PRIMARY KEY.
"Separate table for each customer"? No. This is a common question; the resounding answer is No. I won't repeat all the reasons for not having 100K tables.
Sharding
"Sharding" is splitting the data across multiple machines.
To do sharding, you need to have code somewhere that looks at domain and decides which server will handle the query, then hands it off. Sharding is advisable when you have write scaling problems. You did not mention such, so it is unclear whether sharding is advisable.
When sharding on something like domain (or domain_id), you could use (1) a hash to pick the server, (2) a dictionary lookup (of 100K rows), or (3) a hybrid.
I like the hybrid -- hash to, say, 1024 values, then look up into a 1024-row table to see which machine has the data. Since adding a new shard and migrating a user to a different shard are major undertakings, I feel that the hybrid is a reasonable compromise. The lookup table needs to be distributed to all clients that redirect actions to shards.
If your 'writing' is running out of steam, see high speed ingestion for possible ways to speed that up.
PARTITIONing
PARTITIONing is splitting the data across multiple "sub-tables".
There are only a limited number of use cases where partitioning buys you any performance. You not indicated that any apply to your use case. Read that blog and see if you think that partitioning might be useful.
You mentioned "partition by date range". Will most of the queries include a date range? If so, such partitioning may be advisable. (See the link above for best practices.) Some other options come to mind:
Plan A: PRIMARY KEY(domain_id, stats_time, id) But that is bulky and requires even more overhead on each secondary index. (Each secondary index silently includes all the columns of the PK.)
Plan B: Have stats_time include microseconds, then tweak the values to avoid having dups. Then use stats_time instead of id. But this requires some added complexity, especially if there are multiple clients inserting data. (I can elaborate if needed.)
Plan C: Have a table that maps stats_time values to ids. Look up the id range before doing the real query, then use both WHERE id BETWEEN ... AND stats_time .... (Again, messy code.)
Summary tables
Are many of the queries of the form of counting things over date ranges? Suggest having Summary Tables based perhaps on per-hour. More discussion.
COUNT(DISTINCT sid) is especially difficult to fold into summary tables. For example, the unique counts for each hour cannot be added together to get the unique count for the day. But I have a technique for that, too.
I wouldn't do this if i were you. First thing that come to mind would be, on receive a pageview message, i send the message to a queue so that a worker can pickup and insert to database later (in bulk maybe); also i increase the counter of siteid:date in redis (for example). Doing count in sql is just a bad idea for this scenario.

How to avoid full table scan

I have a MYSQL database around 50GB size with millions of rows. Here is my table structure
CREATE TABLE `logs` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`mac` varchar(255) COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci DEFAULT NULL,
`firstTime` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
`lastTime` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
`locid` int(11) DEFAULT NULL,
`client_id` int(11) DEFAULT NULL,
`created_at` datetime NOT NULL,
`updated_at` datetime NOT NULL,
`isOut` tinyint(1) DEFAULT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
KEY `index_logs_on_location_id` (`location_id`),
KEY `index_logs_on_client_id` (`client_id`),
KEY `macID` (`macID`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=39537721 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_unicode_ci;
I was looking ways to avoid full table scans. I tried to add index for mac column. However when I run EXPLAIN on my queries, possible_keys and keys are always NULL when I don't use client_id in WHERE clause, otherwise my only used index is client_id or location_id which doesn't have a significant effect on my queries in the sense of execution time. I mainly use these types of queries(grouping,sorting etc..)
SELECT mac,COUNT(mac),DATE(lastTime)
FROM logs
WHERE client_id = 1
GROUP BY mac,DATE(lastTime)
When you consider this type of table structure, how can I optimize my table to execute queries faster? I'm open to all suggestions. Thank you
To get MySQL (or Oracle, SQL Server, Postgres, MariaDB, DB2 and others) to use an index depends on how unique is the data in the mac column and how the distribution of the uniqueness is. The database engines mentioned use a cost based optimizer which estimates the cost of a certain solution and execute the solution with the lowest cost. Sometimes they are incorrect. This estimate can be influenced by playing with database parameters, however this can have unexpected side effects on other queries.
The second way to influence the result is to change the data structure.
The third way, most feasible is to influence the execution plan by providing a hint. For this lets assume an index is present on mac and lastTime so that the db engine only needs to load this index to do its job:
CREATE INDEX idx_mac_nn_1 ON logs(mac,lastTime);
The assumed to be optimized query is (so your version without the client_id column)
SELECT mac,COUNT(mac),DATE(lastTime)
FROM logs FORCE INDEX idx_mac_nn_1
GROUP BY mac,DATE(lastTime);
This then should force MySQL to use the index no matter what.
For this query:
SELECT mac, COUNT(mac), DATE(lastTime)
FROM logs
WHERE client_id = 1
GROUP BY mac, DATE(lastTime)
You want an index on (client_id, mac, lastTime). I would suggest a covering index, if you don't mind the extra space required.

Count the number of rows between unix time stamps for each ID

I'm trying to populate some data for a table. The query is being run on a table that contains ~50 million records. The query I'm currently using is below. It counts the number of rows that match the template id and are BETWEEN two unix timestamps:
SELECT COUNT(*) as count FROM `s_log`
WHERE `time_sent` BETWEEN '1346904000' AND '1346993271'
AND `template` = '1'
While the query above does work, performance is rather slow while looping through each template which at times can be in the hundreds. The time stamps are stored as int and are properly indexed. Just to test thing out, I tried running the query below, omitting the time_sent restriction:
SELECT COUNT(*) as count FROM `s_log`
AND `template` = '1'
As expected, it runs very fast, but is obviously not restricting count results inside the correct time frame. How can I obtain a count for a specific template AND restrict that count BETWEEN two unix timestamps?
EXPLAIN:
1 | SIMPLE | s_log | ref | time_sent,template | template | 4 | const | 71925 | Using where
SHOW CREATE TABLE s_log:
CREATE TABLE `s_log` (
`id` int(255) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`email` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
`time_sent` int(25) NOT NULL,
`template` int(55) NOT NULL,
`key` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
`node_id` int(55) NOT NULL,
`status` varchar(55) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
KEY `email` (`email`),
KEY `time_sent` (`time_sent`),
KEY `template` (`template`),
KEY `node_id` (`node_id`),
KEY `key` (`key`),
KEY `status` (`status`),
KEY `timestamp` (`timestamp`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=2078966 DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1
The best index you may have in this case is composite one template + time_sent
CREATE INDEX template_time_sent ON s_log (template, time_sent)
PS: Also as long as all your columns in the query are integer DON'T enclose their values in quotes (in some cases it could lead to issues, at least with older mysql versions)
First, you have to create an index that has both of your columns together (not seperately). Also check your table type, i think it would work great if your table is innoDB.
And lastly, use your WHERE clause in this fashion:
`WHEREtemplate= '1' ANDtime_sent` BETWEEN '1346904000' AND '1346993271'
What this does is first check if template is 1, if it is then it would check for the second condition else skip. This will definitely give you performance-edge
If you have to call the query for each template maybe it would be faster to get all the information with one query call by using GROUP BY:
SELECT template, COUNT(*) as count FROM `s_log`
WHERE `time_sent` BETWEEN 1346904000 AND 1346993271;
GROUP BY template
It's just a guess that this would be faster and you also would have to redesign your code a bit.
You could also try to use InnoDB instead of MyISAM. InnoDB uses a clustered index which maybe performs better on large tables. From the MySQL site:
Accessing a row through the clustered index is fast because the row data is on the same page where the index search leads. If a table is large, the clustered index architecture often saves a disk I/O operation when compared to storage organizations that store row data using a different page from the index record. (For example, MyISAM uses one file for data rows and another for index records.)
There are some questions on Stackoverflow which discuss the performance between InnoDB and MyISAM:
Should I use MyISAM or InnoDB Tables for my MySQL Database?
Migrating from MyISAM to InnoDB
MyISAM versus InnoDB