Differences Between the NDB and InnoDB Storage Engines

The NDB Cluster NDB storage engine is implemented using a distributed, shared-nothing architecture, which causes it to behave differently from InnoDB in a number of ways. For those unaccustomed to working with NDB, unexpected behaviors can arise due to its distributed nature with regard to transactions, foreign keys, table limits, and other characteristics. These are shown in the following table:

Feature	InnoDB 1.1	NDB Cluster NDB 7.5
MySQL Server Version	5.7	5.7
InnoDB Version	InnoDB 5.7.19	InnoDB 5.7.19
NDB Cluster Version	N/A	NDB 7.5.7
Storage Limits	64TB	3TB (Practical upper limit based on 48 data nodes with 64GB RAM each; can be increased with disk-based data and BLOBs)
Foreign Keys	Yes	Yes.
Transactions	All standard types	READ COMMITTED
MVCC	Yes	No
Data Compression	Yes	No (NDB Cluster checkpoint and backup files can be compressed)
Large Row Support (> 14K)	Supported for VARBINARY, VARCHAR, BLOB, and TEXT columns	Supported for BLOB and TEXT columns only (Using these types to store very large amounts of data can lower NDB Cluster performance)
Replication Support	Asynchronous and semisynchronous replication using MySQL Replication	Automatic synchronous replication within an NDB Cluster . Asynchronous replication between NDB Cluster s, using MySQL Replication
Scaleout for Read Operations	Yes (MySQL Replication)	Yes (Automatic partitioning in NDB Cluster ; NDB Cluster Replication)
Scaleout for Write Operations	Requires application-level partitioning (sharding)	Yes (Automatic partitioning in NDB Cluster is transparent to applications)
High Availability (HA)	Requires additional software	Yes (Designed for 99.999% uptime)
Node Failure Recovery and Failover	Requires additional software	Automatic (Key element in NDB Cluster architecture)
Time for Node Failure Recovery	30 seconds or longer	Typically < 1 second
Real-Time Performance	No	Yes
In-Memory Tables	No	Yes (Some data can optionally be stored on disk; both in-memory and disk data storage are durable)
NoSQL Access to Storage Engine	Yes	Yes Multiple APIs, including Memcached, Node.js/JavaScript, Java, JPA, C++, and HTTP/REST
Concurrent and Parallel Writes	Not supported	Up to 48 writers, optimized for concurrent writes
Conflict Detection and Resolution (Multiple Replication Masters)	No	Yes
Hash Indexes	No	Yes
Online Addition of Nodes	Read-only replicas using MySQL Replication	Yes (all node types)
Online Upgrades	No	Yes
Online Schema Modifications	Yes, as part of MySQL 5.6.	Yes.