7.1.1 Space Needed for Keys

MySQL can support different index types, but the normal type is ISAM or MyISAM. These use a B-tree index, and you can roughly calculate the size for the index file as (key_length+4)/0.67, summed over all keys. (This is for the worst case when all keys are inserted in sorted order and we don't have any compressed keys.)

String indexes are space compressed. If the first index part is a string, it will also be prefix compressed. Space compression makes the index file smaller than the above figures if the string column has a lot of trailing space or is a VARCHAR column that is not always used to the full length. Prefix compression is used on keys that start with a string. Prefix compression helps if there are many strings with an identical prefix.

In MyISAM tables, you can also prefix compress numbers by specifying PACK_KEYS=1 when you create the table. This helps when you have many integer keys that have an identical prefix when the numbers are stored high-byte first.

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