I’m always switching back-and-forth between the 2 different InnoDB flavors in MariaDB – XtraDB+ and the standard InnoDB plugin, so I thought I’d simply post all of the various combinations in a single place. (And then I cover enabling the InnoDB Plugin in MySQL, since it’s an option in 5.1.) [Addition: Thanks to Andrew and Sergei for the tips on shortening plugin-load=. The changes are reflected below.]

Note: Below is for Windows. For Linux, simply change “.dll” to “.so” where appropriate.

MariaDB 10.0:

Do not add anything, as the standard InnoDB plugin is the current default (as of 10.0.3, although I do anticipate this changing in the near future, and I’ll update the post accordingly when that happens).

MariaDB 5.5:

# Enable the 2 below to disable XtraDB+ and enable the standard InnoDB Plugin
ignore_builtin_innodb
plugin-load=ha_innodb.dll

…

In my last post, I discussed how to troubleshoot InnoDB locks using the new InnoDB Plugin’s new Information Schema tables.

However, that got me to thinking about how many MySQL 5.1 users who have still not switched to use the plugin as opposed to the built-in version of InnoDB.

There are many advantages to using the plugin as opposed to the built-in version (aside from just the new I_S tables, and more importantly, numerous performance enhancements), and it’s breeze to set up, so I wanted to provide a quick start guide to using the new InnoDB plugin.

Note that the …