barracuda vs Antelope for innodb

Hello All,

We recently switched to Percona SQL.

After moving first server, we noticed that it has very optimized configuration out of the box except innodb_file_format is set to “Antelope”.

I believe that barracuda is newer and may be better. But I used to think compression storage will save disk-space at the cost of CPU-cycles.

So which “innodb_file_format” is recommended?

We need to stick to one as we are planning to move more than a dozen setups this weekend.

Thanks.

Using Barracuda format does not mean you will use compression automatically. The ROW_FORMAT can be either dynamic or compressed.
[URL]http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/innodb-row-format-dynamic.html[/URL]
Also compressed tables feature is improved in MySQL 5.6 - [URL]https://blogs.oracle.com/mysqlinnodb/entry/innodb_compression_improvements_in_mysql[/URL]

Whether you will benefit from Barracuda or not depends on your data and workload. You can get some idea from this article:
[URL]http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2008/04/23/real-life-use-case-for-barracuda-innodb-file-format/[/URL]

@przemek

Thanks for your answer and helpful links. :slight_smile:

For now, I am sticking to defaults.

If goal of compression is to save some disk space at the cost of CPU overhead in compression work, it is not useful in our case.

Rahul, regarding compression you may find this fresh new blog post interesting: [url]http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2013/08/29/considering-tokudb-as-an-engine-for-timeseries-data/[/url]
As seen there, compression overhead in InnoDB is pretty significant while tokuDB does that much better.