Help Center/ Relational Database Service_RDS for MySQL/ FAQs/ Database Storage/ What Storage Engines Does RDS for MySQL Support?
Updated on 2026-10-08 GMT+08:00
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What Storage Engines Does RDS for MySQL Support?

A database storage engine is a mechanism for storing data. It provides core services for data storage, processing, and protection. It can be used to control access permissions and rapidly process transactions to meet enterprise requirements.

InnoDB Storage Engine

For RDS for MySQL instances, only the InnoDB storage engine supports full backup and restoration. Therefore, InnoDB is recommended for RDS for MySQL.

Other Storage Engines

Table 1 lists the storage engines not supported by RDS for MySQL 5.6 or later versions.

Table 1 Storage engine limitations

Storage Engine

Reason

MyISAM
  • MyISAM engine tables do not support transactions. They only support table-level locks. As a result, read and write operations conflict with each other.
  • MyISAM is not good at protecting data integrity. Data can be damaged or lost.
  • If data is damaged, MyISAM does not support data restoration provided by RDS for MySQL. Data can only be restored manually.
  • Data can be transparently migrated from MyISAM to InnoDB. In most cases, you do not need to modify table creation SQL statements, as RDS automatically converts the storage engine to InnoDB during migration.

FEDERATED
  • If primary/standby DB instances support FEDERATED, the same DML operations will be repeatedly executed on remote databases, and the data will become disordered.
  • For PITR restoration, after a full backup is restored, data on remote databases is not restored to the state it was in when the full backup was created. Accessing data during an incremental restoration will disorder FEDERATED table data.

MEMORY
  • If a MEMORY table implicitly becomes empty, the database automatically writes a DELETE event to the binlog when the table is opened. If a primary/standby DB instance uses memory tables and the standby instance (or a read replica) is restarted, a GTID is generated, which makes the standby inconsistent with that of the primary instance. As a result, the standby instance (read replica) has to be rebuilt.
  • Using memory tables may cause out-of-memory (OOM) errors and even service terminations.

FAQ

Q: If the storage engines I obtained after running SHOW ENGINES on my RDS for MySQL instance contain not only the InnoDB storage engine, which storage engine is actually supported by RDS for MySQL?

A: The InnoDB storage engine. The storage engines returned in the command output of SHOW ENGINES are not the actual available engines, and they can be disabled by the parameter disabled_storage_engines.

Parent Topic: Database Storage