Re: Innodb: support for wide tables coming?

[Rick James]

InnoDB supports (and always has) wide tables. However, there are a few cases where it hits limits.

The one case that comes to mind: dozens of VARCHAR(255) can hit a limit.

But you can, for example, have 8 MEDIUMTEXT or MEDIUMBLOB columns, with a 16MB limit on each. Or even LONGTEXT/LONGBLOB (except that it is difficult to load a column that big).

Two workarounds
* vertical partitioning (move some columns to another, parallel, table)
* change the ROW_FORMAT. There are 4 ROW_FORMATs, one is especially friendly to "wide" tables, possibly allowing hundreds of, say, MEDIUMTEXT fields.

Do you have a CREATE TABLE for a wide MyISAM table? Change the name and the ENGINE clause and see if the CREATE will work. It probably will work. If not, show it to us; we can give you tip(s) on what to do to make it work.

InnoDB has a hard limit of 64TB (that's terabytes) for the entire table. But that can be worked around. I can see a way to make a 512PB (petabyte) table. (But I can't afford that much disk. And it would take _years_ to load it.)

If you would like to point to the reference that says "MyISAM supports tables with wider/larger records than innodb does", I can probably explain why it not not completely correct.