How much memory will a MEMORY table take up?

Let's say I have a MyISAM table with a data length of 4.8GB and an index length of 6.2GB. So, a total data size of eleven gig. How much memory would this require, were I to convert it to a MEMORY table? 11 gig, or more?

The exact memory requirement of a row is calculated from the following formula:

SUM_OVER_ALL_BTREE_KEYS(max_length_of_key + sizeof(char*) × 4)
+ SUM_OVER_ALL_HASH_KEYS(sizeof(char*) × 2)
+ ALIGN(length_of_row+1, sizeof(char*))

[src]


ALIGN() represents a round-up factor to cause the row length to be an exact multiple of the char pointer size. sizeof(char*) is 4 on 32-bit machines and 8 on 64-bit machines.

So, on a 64-bit machine, replace sizeof(char*) with 8.

You can get an estimate of the length_of_row from the Information Schema:

SELECT TABLE_ROWS, AVG_ROW_LENGTH FROM information_schema.tables WHERE  table_schema='foo' AND table_name='bar';

Then you add up all your BTREE keys and then HASH keys. Note that it might be worth it space-wise to convert any keys to HASH, as they require less memory.

I was going to mention the limitation of maximum MEMORY size dependent on max_heap_table_size, but gbn beat me to it.

StackExchange Database Administrators Q#11912, answer score: 7