Nick Duncan

While developing myScoop, and other experimental projects, I have been thinking about the limitations of a MySQL database, particularly it’s maximum file size. I was amazed that after some research I really have absolutely nothing to worry about. It seems my 112mb database is a “new born baby” in the terms of how big it can still grow. Here are the estimated maximum file sizes per operating system:

This information was taken directly off MySQL.com but this is not necessarily the maximum limitations of your database. A number of methods can help to increase your max file size:

LFS (Large File Support) in Linux
To support files larger than 2GiB on 32-bit Linux systems you would have to use LFS. Although I’m sure the latest operating systems would come out with this already enabled. The standard max file size limitations without LFS enabled are 2^31 bytes(2GiB), but enabling LFS can enable your maximum file size to reach 2^63 bytes (9 223 372 036 854 775 808 bytes). Crazy, I know!

Using the “Alter Table” command
This will come in handy when using the MyISAM storage engine. The simple “Alter Table” in the mysql prompt command can extend your database capacity dramatically.
Example: “alter table ‘weather’ max_rows = 200000000000″
Although keep in mind, the maximum amount of rows in a MySQL table can only be 4.2billion (not so good if you’re thinking of making a search engine!)

Most of this researched information is very old so I decided to run a little check (which I should have done right in the beginning), and by doing so on my local machine, I literally nearly fell of my chair:

mysql> show table status like ‘blog_hits’ \G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
Name: blog_hits
Engine: MyISAM
Version: 10
Row_format: Dynamic
Rows: 15497
Avg_row_length: 247
Data_length: 3835852
Max_data_length: 281474976710655
Index_length: 366592
Data_free: 0
Auto_increment: 15509
Create_time: 2009-11-24 16:53:38
Update_time: 2009-11-24 16:53:38
Check_time: 2009-11-24 16:53:38
Collation: latin1_swedish_ci
Checksum: NULL
Create_options:
Comment:
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

This is telling me my max database size can be as much as 281474976710655 bytes which If I’m not mistaken, equates to 256 terabytes. With this being said, I think we are going to run into system limitations rather than MySQL limitations, so therefore, revert back to the table at the top of this post.