Aria is a

storage engine A database engine (or storage engine) is the underlying software component that a database management system (DBMS) uses to create, read, update and delete (CRUD) data from a database. Most database management systems include their own application ...

for the

MariaDB MariaDB is a community-developed, commercially supported fork of the MySQL relational database management system (RDBMS), intended to remain free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License. Development is led by some of the ori ...

and

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database o ...

relational database management system A relational database is a (most commonly digital) database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A system used to maintain relational databases is a relational database management system (RDBMS). Many relatio ...

s. Its goal is to make a crash-safe alternative to

MyISAM MyISAM was the default storage engine for the MySQL relational database management system versions prior to 5.5 released in December 2009. It is based on the older ISAM code, but it has many useful extensions. Filesystem Each MyISAM table is s ...

. It is not transactional. Aria has been in development since 2007 and was first announced by Michael "Monty" Widenius on his blog. Aria is used for internal temporary tables in

, a community-developed branch of the MySQL database led by Widenius. Aria is not shipped with MySQL or

Percona Server Percona Server for MySQL is a distribution of the MySQL relational database management system created by Percona. Percona Server for MySQL is an open source relational database management system (RDBMS). It is a free, fully compatible drop in ...

. The Maria project is hosted on

Launchpad A launch pad is an above-ground platform from which rocket- missiles or space launch vehicles take off vertically. Launch pad may also refer to: Computing * Launchpad (macOS), an application launcher introduced in Mac OS X Lion * Launch Pad (s ...

. Aria was initially named "Maria", as a reference to Monty's youngest child. It was renamed Aria in 2010 to avoid confusion with the main database it is developed for, MariaDB. Chris Tooley, who won a contest to suggest the name, wrote, "Aria is Maria without the 'M'; also it is a pleasant

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Features

Aria is very similar to MyISAM, but its purpose is to be a crash-safe alternative to MyISAM. Aria does not support

foreign key A foreign key is a set of attributes in a table that refers to the primary key of another table. The foreign key links these two tables. Another way to put it: In the context of relational databases, a foreign key is a set of attributes subject to ...

s and, currently, transactions. Aria supports: *

Fulltext In text retrieval, full-text search refers to techniques for searching a single computer-stored document or a collection in a full-text database. Full-text search is distinguished from searches based on metadata or on parts of the original texts r ...

indexes; *

OpenGIS The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), an international voluntary consensus standards organization for geospatial content and location-based services, sensor web and Internet of Things, GIS data processing and data sharing. It originated in 19 ...

data types; *

Virtual column In relational databases a virtual column is a table column whose value is automatically computed using other columns values, or another deterministic expression. Virtual columns are defined of SQL:2003 as Generated Column, and are only implemented ...

Files structure

Non-partitioned Aria tables consist of three physical files: * table_name.frm * table_name.MAD * table_name.MAI The .frm file contains the table definition (this file exists for all storage engines which write data to disk). The .MAD file contains the data. The .MAI file contains the indexes.

Formats

Three table formats are available for Aria tables: * PAGE; * FIXED; * DYNAMIC. PAGE is the only format available for "transactional" tables. It makes Aria tables crash-safe. FIXED and DYNAMIC are the same formats used by MyISAM, and have been mainly implemented for compatibility. However, MyISAM's COMPRESSED format is not available in Aria. In order to set the table format, one can use the ROW_FORMAT option in a CREATE TABLE or ALTER TABLE command.

References

External links

Aria in the MariaDB KnowledgeBase
- written by

Michael Widenius Ulf Michael Widenius (often called Monty; born 3 March 1962, in Helsinki, Finland) is the main author of the original version of the open source MySQL database, a founding member of the MySQL AB company and CTO of the MariaDB Corporation AB. Add ...

(founder of MySQL AB)
Maria: The new MySQL Storage Engine
at

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- A talk given by Michael Widenius Database engines MySQL MariaDB {{Free-software-stub

Features

Files structure

Formats

See also

References

External links