7.5.12.2 File Space Management

The datafiles you define in the configuration file form the tablespace of InnoDB. The files are simply catenated to form the tablespace, there is no striping in use. Currently you cannot define where in the tablespace your tables will be allocated. However, in a newly created tablespace, InnoDB will allocate space starting from the low end.

The tablespace consists of database pages whose default size is 16 KB. The pages are grouped into extents of 64 consecutive pages. The 'files' inside a tablespace are called segments in InnoDB. The name of the rollback segment is somewhat misleading because it actually contains many segments in the tablespace.

For each index in InnoDB we allocate two segments: one is for non-leaf nodes of the B-tree, the other is for the leaf nodes. The idea here is to achieve better sequentiality for the leaf nodes, which contain the data.

When a segment grows inside the tablespace, InnoDB allocates the first 32 pages to it individually. After that InnoDB starts to allocate whole extents to the segment. InnoDB can add to a large segment up to 4 extents at a time to ensure good sequentiality of data.

Some pages in the tablespace contain bitmaps of other pages, and therefore a few extents in an InnoDB tablespace cannot be allocated to segments as a whole, but only as individual pages.

When you issue a query SHOW TABLE STATUS FROM ... LIKE ... to ask for available free space in the tablespace, InnoDB will report the extents which are definitely free in the tablespace. InnoDB always reserves some extents for clean-up and other internal purposes; these reserved extents are not included in the free space.

When you delete data from a table, InnoDB will contract the corresponding B-tree indexes. It depends on the pattern of deletes if that frees individual pages or extents to the tablespace, so that the freed space is available for other users. Dropping a table or deleting all rows from it is guaranteed to release the space to other users, but remember that deleted rows can be physically removed only in a purge operation after they are no longer needed in transaction rollback or consistent read.

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