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13.7.4 Creating Tables and Indexes within Falcon »
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13.7.3. Creating the Falcon Tablespace

Within Falcon, all data within one database is stored within a within a single file within the MySQL directory structure. The file contains the Falcon data and will be stored in a file with the name of the Falcon database with the extension .fts. For example, Falcon tables defined within the database test will be stored within the file test.fts within the main MySQL data directory.

Falcon also supports named tablespaces which allow you to store tables within specific files that may be different to the default Falcon storage file for that database. Three Falcon tablespaces are created automatically when the Falcon storage engine is enabled within the server. These tables are:

  • An unnamed internal tablespace used to hold system tables.

  • falcon_user, used as the default location for user defined tables.

  • falcon_temporary, used to hold temporary tables.

All tablespaces share the same log files, memory and threads. Transactions run transparently across all tablespaces. There is no inherent relationship between a tablespace and the database/schema to which it relates.

To create a new tablespace, use the CREATE TABLESPACE statement: 

CREATE TABLESPACE tablespace_name
    ADD DATAFILE 'file_name'
    ENGINE [=] Falcon

Two further files are created by Falcon, and these contain the on-disk copy of the Falcon serial log. These are also created within the realm of the corresponding database. In a future release, you will be able to specify an alternate location for these log files. So with the preceding example data file test.fts the log files will be named test.fl1 and test.fl2.

Table definitions are, as with the other MySQL engines, stored within a .frm file within a database specific directory. For example, the table falcontest within the test database will create the table definition file falcontest.frm within the directory test.


User Comments

Posted by Mathias Herberts on January 2 2007 11:19pm[Delete] [Edit]

It is said that the Falcon Storage Engine has been designed with modern database requirements in mind, and particularly for use within high-volume web serving or other environment that requires high performance, while still supporting the transactional and logging functionality required in this environment.

With high-volume web serving usually also comes high volume of data (see Live Journal, Slashdot or others as examples), having all data in a single file does not seem optimal in terms of ease of data management, especially to set up backups, why not have a version of the Falcon engine with a possible limit in file size? Exceeding this limit would create another data file.

Posted by Brian Vetter on April 18 2008 8:39pm[Delete] [Edit]

Kind of late here on the follow up comment, but I would presume that if file size becomes an issue, the administrator could partition the tables using the horizontal partitioning in MySQL. I'm presuming that would result in multiple files within Falcon.

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