Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised Jun 18, 2026

Falcon (storage engine)

Falcon is a discontinued transactional storage engine being developed for the MySQL relational database management system. Development was stopped after Oracle purchased MySQL. It was based on the Netfrastructure database engine. Falcon was designed to take advantage of Sun's ZFS file system.

Last revised
Jun 18, 2026
Read time
≈ 1 min
Length
175 w
Citations
4
Source
Falcon
Original authorJim Starkey
DeveloperSun Microsystems
Preview release
MySQL 6.0.9 / January 10, 2009 (2009-01-10)
Operating systemCross-platform
TypeDatabase engine
LicenseGNU General Public License
Websitewww.mysql.com/mysql60/ Edit this on Wikidata

Falcon is a discontinued1 transactional storage engine being developed for the MySQL relational database management system. Development was stopped after Oracle purchased MySQL.2 It was based on the Netfrastructure database engine. Falcon was designed to take advantage of Sun's ZFS file system.

Architecture analysis showed an interesting mixture of possible performance properties, while low level benchmarks on the first alpha release in 5.1.14-falcon showed that Falcon performed differently from both InnoDB and MyISAM.34 It did better in several tests, worse in others, with inefficient support for the MySQL LIMIT operation a limitation. Its biggest advantage though is known to be ease of use; Falcon requires minimum maintenance and designed to reconfigure itself automatically to handle all types of loads efficiently.

See also

See also

References

References