MySQL Storage Engines

MySQL uses a pluggable architecture for the sotrage engines. Each table is created using a specific storage engine.

Show Available Engines

mysql> show create table person;
+--------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Table | Create Table |
+--------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| person | CREATE TABLE `person` (
 `first_name` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
 PRIMARY KEY (`first_name`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 |
+--------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

or use the SHOW TABLE statment

mysql> show table status;
+--------+--------+---------+------------+------+----------------+-------------+-----------------+--------------+-----------+----------------+---------------------+-------------+------------+-------------------+----------+----------------+---------+
| Name | Engine | Version | Row_format | Rows | Avg_row_length | Data_length | Max_data_length | Index_length | Data_free | Auto_increment | Create_time | Update_time | Check_time | Collation | Checksum | Create_options | Comment |
+--------+--------+---------+------------+------+----------------+-------------+-----------------+--------------+-----------+----------------+---------------------+-------------+------------+-------------------+----------+----------------+---------+
| person | InnoDB | 10 | Dynamic | 0 | 0 | 16384 | 0 | 0 | 0 | NULL | 2016-08-11 17:28:19 | NULL | NULL | latin1_swedish_ci | NULL | | |
+--------+--------+---------+------------+------+----------------+-------------+-----------------+--------------+-----------+----------------+---------------------+-------------+------------+-------------------+----------+----------------+---------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

or from the information_schema database

mysql>
mysql> select table_name, engine from information_schema.tables where table_name = 'person';
+------------+--------+
| table_name | engine |
+------------+--------+
| person | InnoDB |
+------------+--------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)