I’m just starting to use mysql, and I’m basically using it to store and distribute a hash table I’m creating(I don’t care if the data is lost after rebooting or anything). My program basically does a read for a value and if it exists then it reads another value and if that value does not exist it creates it(3 queries in total).
I tried to switch to engine=memory but didn’t notice much of a difference(or any of my free memory being used anymore than usual). So my question is if I want to make read/writes faster by using memory as a storage engine do I need to do anything special other than specify memory when I create it?
There is nothing special you need to do to make the memory engine available. It ships in the standard mysql package.
As far as performance and even memory usage, it really just depends on the schema of your table and how it is used. You can read more about it here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/memory-storage-engine.html