What are storage engines and how we can check the list of storage engines supported by MySQL installation?

It may be defined as the software components that a database management system (DBMS) uses to handle different SQL operations like create, read, update and delete data from the database. In other words, it is used by DBMS to manage information in a database. The most widely used storage engine is InnoDB which is also the default storage engine for MySQL5.5 and upper versions. Prior to MySQL5.5 the default storage engine was MyISAM.

With the help of SHOW ENGINES command we can check the list of storage engines supported by MySQL installation −

mysql> SHOW ENGINES\G

*************************** 1. row ***************************
      Engine: FEDERATED
     Support: NO
     Comment: Federated MySQL storage engine
Transactions: NULL
          XA: NULL
  Savepoints: NULL
*************************** 2. row ***************************
      Engine: MRG_MYISAM
     Support: YES
     Comment: Collection of identical MyISAM tables
Transactions: NO
          XA: NO
  Savepoints: NO
*************************** 3. row ***************************
      Engine: MyISAM
     Support: YES
     Comment: MyISAM storage engine
Transactions: NO
          XA: NO
  Savepoints: NO
*************************** 4. row ***************************
      Engine: BLACKHOLE
     Support: YES
     Comment: /dev/null storage engine (anything you write to it disappear
Transactions: NO
          XA: NO
  Savepoints: NO
*************************** 5. row ***************************
      Engine: CSV
     Support: YES
     Comment: CSV storage engine
Transactions: NO
          XA: NO
  Savepoints: NO
*************************** 6. row ***************************
      Engine: MEMORY
     Support: YES
     Comment: Hash based, stored in memory, useful for temporary tables
Transactions: NO
          XA: NO
  Savepoints: NO
*************************** 7. row ***************************
      Engine: ARCHIVE
     Support: YES
     Comment: Archive storage engine
Transactions: NO
          XA: NO
  Savepoints: NO
*************************** 8. row ***************************
      Engine: InnoDB
     Support: DEFAULT
     Comment: Supports transactions, row-level locking, and foreign keys
Transactions: YES
          XA: YES
  Savepoints: YES
*************************** 9. row ***************************
      Engine: PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA
     Support: YES
     Comment: Performance Schema
Transactions: NO
          XA: NO
  Savepoints: NO
9 rows in set (0.00 sec)