Which storage engine?

[noel bristow]

Hi,

I have recently built a large database to process scientific measurements. The database consists of about 30 tables holding the configuration information for the system and a single table to hold the measurements. The configuration tables are rarely updated, whereas the measurement table has about 60,000,000 new records added every day (using LOAD DATA INFILE...). The intention is to run the whole system for about 3 years. Once the records are added they will are not updated. The database runs on a 1.5Tb RAID server.
The purpose of the database is to be able to query this information in various ways, based on the configuration tables, so quite complex queries will be attempted (so far using multiple levels of views).
I have been using InnoDB up till recently (it's been running for about 2 months), but ibdata1 has suddenly shot up in size (from 50Gb to 950Gb) - perhaps because I created a rather large temporary table from a badly written query!

What is the best storage engine to use?
If I use InnoDB should I use "innodb_file_per_table"?


Any other suggestions gratefully received.

Cheers, Noel.