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14.3. The MERGE Storage Engine

The MERGE storage engine, also known as the MRG_MyISAM engine, is a collection of identical MyISAM tables that can be used as one. “Identical” means that all tables have identical column and index information. You cannot merge MyISAM tables in which the columns are listed in a different order, do not have exactly the same columns, or have the indexes in different order. However, any or all of the MyISAM tables can be compressed with myisampack. See Section 8.4, “myisampack — Generate Compressed, Read-Only MyISAM Tables”. Differences in table options such as AVG_ROW_LENGTH, MAX_ROWS, or PACK_KEYS do not matter.

When you create a MERGE table, MySQL creates two files on disk. The files have names that begin with the table name and have an extension to indicate the file type. An .frm file stores the table format, and an .MRG file contains the names of the tables that should be used as one. The tables do not have to be in the same database as the MERGE table itself.

You can use SELECT, DELETE, UPDATE, and INSERT on MERGE tables. You must have SELECT, UPDATE, and DELETE privileges on the MyISAM tables that you map to a MERGE table.

If you DROP the MERGE table, you are dropping only the MERGE specification. The underlying tables are not affected.

To create a MERGE table, you must specify a UNION=(list-of-tables) clause that indicates which MyISAM tables you want to use as one. You can optionally specify an INSERT_METHOD option if you want inserts for the MERGE table to take place in the first or last table of the UNION list. Use a value of FIRST or LAST to cause inserts to be made in the first or last table, respectively. If you do not specify an INSERT_METHOD option or if you specify it with a value of NO, attempts to insert rows into the MERGE table result in an error.

The following example shows how to create a MERGE table:

mysql> CREATE TABLE t1 (
    ->    a INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
    ->    message CHAR(20)) ENGINE=MyISAM;
mysql> CREATE TABLE t2 (
    ->    a INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
    ->    message CHAR(20)) ENGINE=MyISAM;
mysql> INSERT INTO t1 (message) VALUES ('Testing'),('table'),('t1');
mysql> INSERT INTO t2 (message) VALUES ('Testing'),('table'),('t2');
mysql> CREATE TABLE total (
    ->    a INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
    ->    message CHAR(20), INDEX(a))
    ->    ENGINE=MERGE UNION=(t1,t2) INSERT_METHOD=LAST;

Note that the a column is indexed as a PRIMARY KEY in the underlying MyISAM tables, but not in the MERGE table. There it is indexed but not as a PRIMARY KEY because a MERGE table cannot enforce uniqueness over the set of underlying tables.

After creating the MERGE table, you can issue queries that operate on the group of tables as a whole:

mysql> SELECT * FROM total;
+---+---------+
| a | message |
+---+---------+
| 1 | Testing |
| 2 | table   |
| 3 | t1      |
| 1 | Testing |
| 2 | table   |
| 3 | t2      |
+---+---------+

Note that you can also manipulate the .MRG file directly from outside of the MySQL server:

shell> cd /mysql-data-directory/current-database
shell> ls -1 t1 t2 > total.MRG
shell> mysqladmin flush-tables

To remap a MERGE table to a different collection of MyISAM tables, you can use one of the following methods:

  • DROP the MERGE table and re-create it.

  • Use ALTER TABLE tbl_name UNION=(...) to change the list of underlying tables.

  • Change the .MRG file and issue a FLUSH TABLE statement for the MERGE table and all underlying tables to force the storage engine to read the new definition file.

MERGE tables can help you solve the following problems:

  • Easily manage a set of log tables. For example, you can put data from different months into separate tables, compress some of them with myisampack, and then create a MERGE table to use them as one.

  • Obtain more speed. You can split a big read-only table based on some criteria, and then put individual tables on different disks. A MERGE table on this could be much faster than using the big table.

  • Perform more efficient searches. If you know exactly what you are looking for, you can search in just one of the split tables for some queries and use a MERGE table for others. You can even have many different MERGE tables that use overlapping sets of tables.

  • Perform more efficient repairs. It is easier to repair individual tables that are mapped to a MERGE table than to repair a single large table.

  • Instantly map many tables as one. A MERGE table need not maintain an index of its own because it uses the indexes of the individual tables. As a result, MERGE table collections are very fast to create or remap. (Note that you must still specify the index definitions when you create a MERGE table, even though no indexes are created.)

  • If you have a set of tables from which you create a large table on demand, you should instead create a MERGE table on them on demand. This is much faster and saves a lot of disk space.

  • Exceed the file size limit for the operating system. Each MyISAM table is bound by this limit, but a collection of MyISAM tables is not.

  • You can create an alias or synonym for a MyISAM table by defining a MERGE table that maps to that single table. There should be no really notable performance impact from doing this (only a couple of indirect calls and memcpy() calls for each read).

The disadvantages of MERGE tables are:

  • You can use only identical MyISAM tables for a MERGE table.

  • You cannot use a number of MyISAM features in MERGE tables. For example, you cannot create FULLTEXT indexes on MERGE tables. (You can, of course, create FULLTEXT indexes on the underlying MyISAM tables, but you cannot search the MERGE table with a full-text search.)

  • If the MERGE table is non-temporary, all underlying MyISAM tables must be non-temporary, too. If the MERGE table is temporary, the MyISAM tables can be any mix of temporary and non-temporary.

  • MERGE tables use more file descriptors. If 10 clients are using a MERGE table that maps to 10 tables, the server uses (10 × 10) + 10 file descriptors. (10 data file descriptors for each of the 10 clients, and 10 index file descriptors shared among the clients.)

  • Key reads are slower. When you read a key, the MERGE storage engine needs to issue a read on all underlying tables to check which one most closely matches the given key. To read the next key, the MERGE storage engine needs to search the read buffers to find the next key. Only when one key buffer is used up does the storage engine need to read the next key block. This makes MERGE keys much slower on eq_ref searches, but not much slower on ref searches. See Section 7.2.1, “Optimizing Queries with EXPLAIN, for more information about eq_ref and ref.

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