28.3.13 The INFORMATION_SCHEMA ENGINES Table

The ENGINES table provides information about storage engines. This is particularly useful for checking whether a storage engine is supported, or to see what the default engine is.

The ENGINES table has these columns:

ENGINE
The name of the storage engine.

SUPPORT

The server's level of support for the storage engine, as shown in the following table.

Value	Meaning
`YES`	The engine is supported and is active
`DEFAULT`	Like `YES`, plus this is the default engine
`NO`	The engine is not supported
`DISABLED`	The engine is supported but has been disabled

A value of NO means that the server was compiled without support for the engine, so it cannot be enabled at runtime.

A value of DISABLED occurs either because the server was started with an option that disables the engine, or because not all options required to enable it were given. In the latter case, the error log should contain a reason indicating why the option is disabled. See Section 7.4.2, “The Error Log”.

You might also see DISABLED for a storage engine if the server was compiled to support it, but was started with a --skip-engine_name option. For the NDB storage engine, DISABLED means the server was compiled with support for NDB Cluster, but was not started with the --ndbcluster option.

All MySQL servers support MyISAM tables. It is not possible to disable MyISAM.

COMMENT
A brief description of the storage engine.
TRANSACTIONS
Whether the storage engine supports transactions.
XA
Whether the storage engine supports XA transactions.
SAVEPOINTS
Whether the storage engine supports savepoints.

Notes

ENGINES is a nonstandard INFORMATION_SCHEMA table.

Storage engine information is also available from the SHOW ENGINES statement. See Section 15.7.7.16, “SHOW ENGINES Statement”. The following statements are equivalent:

SELECT * FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.ENGINES

SHOW ENGINES