Re: Innodb vs. myisam storage usage *shocked*

[James Day]

If you don't mind alpha software you might try version 5.0.3 or later, whcih has this change: " InnoDB: Introduced a compact record format that does not store the number of columns or the lengths of fixed-size columns. The old format can be requested by specifying ROW_FORMAT=REDUNDANT. The new format (ROW_FORMAT=COMPACT) is the default". http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/news-5-0-3.html

Also, "A record contains also a pointer to each field of the record. If the total length of the fields in a record is less than 128 bytes, the pointer is one byte; otherwise, two bytes". http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/innodb-physical-record.html

So it may be that your small and efficient field types are actually smaller than the field information InnoDB keeps in current production releases of InnoDB.