The Storage Engine

Question

In MariaDB's architecture, what is the primary purpose and behavior of the "Pluggable Storage Engine" API?

Answer 1

It is a deprecated system replaced by the "Unified Buffer Pool," which now requires all tables to share a single, fixed storage format to ensure ACID compliance across the entire instance.

Answer 2

It is a plugin that allows MariaDB to connect directly to NoSQL databases like MongoDB and Cassandra using the standard MySQL protocol without needing a local storage engine.

Answer 3

It allows the server to support multiple storage engines (like InnoDB, MyRocks, or Spider) simultaneously, enabling different tables in the same database to use different storage technologies optimized for specific workloads.