This afternoon, Arjen Lentz and I were discussing InnoDB’s behavior without a declared PRIMARY KEY, and the topic felt interesting enough and undocumented enough to warrant its own short post.
Background on InnoDB clustered keys
In The physical structure of InnoDB index pages I described how “Everything is an index in InnoDB”. This means that InnoDB must always have a “cluster key” for each table, which is normally the PRIMARY KEY. The manual has this to say in Clustered and Secondary Indexes:
[Read more...]If the table has no PRIMARY KEY or suitable UNIQUE index, InnoDB internally generates a hidden clustered