Re: No Indexes??

[Brian Aker]

Hi!

> o Will indexes be supported in a future version?

That is an open question. Currently the thought is to support unique key and sparse indexes. Most applications that we are seeing require sparse cases, but not traditional b-tree.

> o If not - what is the reasoning not to include support for indexes?

Size, and the original request for the engine came with "do not support indexes". The engine was really designed for being able to do fast scans, which means indexes are just not useful.

> o Is "alter table" supported in this engine?

Yes.

> o Can an ARCHIVE table be used in a MERGE table union?

No, but in 5.1 there is a partition engine which will give you more then MERGE.

> o Documentation says "A straight INSERT just pushes rows into a compression buffer, and that buffer flushes

A SELECT or closing the table causes this. I am looking at making this buffer disk backed in 5.1, so that a crash of the database will be able to recover data in the buffer at that moment (which means I will probably reintroduce transaction support).

Cheers,

-Brian