Description

The MERGE storage engine, also known as the MRG_MyISAM engine, is a collection of identical MyISAM tables that can be used as one. "Identical" means that all tables have identical column and index information. You cannot merge MyISAM tables in which the columns are listed in a different order, do not have exactly the same columns, or have the indexes in different order. However, any or all of the MyISAM tables can be compressed with myisampack. Columns names and indexes names can be different, as long as data types and NULL/NOT NULL clauses are the same. Differences in table options such as AVG_ROW_LENGTH, MAX_ROWS, or PACK_KEYS do not matter.

Each index in a MERGE table must match an index in underlying MyISAM tables, but the opposite is not true. Also, a MERGE table cannot have a PRIMARY KEY or UNIQUE indexes, because it cannot enforce uniqueness over all underlying tables.

The following options are meaningful for MERGE tables:

• UNION. This option specifies the list of the underlying MyISAM tables. The list is enclosed between parentheses and separated with commas.
• INSERT_METHOD. This options specifies whether, and how, INSERTs are allowed for the table. Allowed values are: NO (INSERTs are not allowed), FIRST (new rows will be written into the first table specified in the UNION list), LAST (new rows will be written into the last table specified in the UNION list). The default value is NO.

If you define a MERGE table with a definition which is different from the underlying MyISAM tables, or one of the underlying tables is not MyISAM, the CREATE TABLE statement will not return any error. But any statement which involves the table will produce an error like the following:

ERROR 1168 (HY000): Unable to open underlying table which is differently defined 
  or of non-MyISAM type or doesn't exist

A CHECK TABLE will show more information about the problem.

The error is also produced if the table is properly define, but an underlying table's definition changes at some point in time.

If you try to insert a new row into a MERGE table with INSERT_METHOD=NO, you will get an error like the following:

ERROR 1036 (HY000): Table 'tbl_name' is read only

It is possible to build a MERGE table on MyISAM tables which have one or more virtual columns. MERGE itself does not support virtual columns, thus such columns will be seen as regular columns. The data types and sizes will still need to be identical, and they cannot be NOT NULL.

Examples

CREATE TABLE t1 (
    a INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
    message CHAR(20)) ENGINE=MyISAM;

CREATE TABLE t2 (
    a INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
    message CHAR(20)) ENGINE=MyISAM;


INSERT INTO t1 (message) VALUES ('Testing'),('table'),('t1');

INSERT INTO t2 (message) VALUES ('Testing'),('table'),('t2');

CREATE TABLE total (
    a INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
    message CHAR(20), INDEX(a))
    ENGINE=MERGE UNION=(t1,t2) INSERT_METHOD=LAST;

SELECT * FROM total;
+---+---------+
| a | message |
+---+---------+
| 1 | Testing |
| 2 | table   |
| 3 | t1      |
| 1 | Testing |
| 2 | table   |
| 3 | t2      |
+---+---------+

In the following example, we'll create three MyISAM tables, and then a MERGE table on them. However, one of them uses a different data type for the column b, so a SELECT will produce an error:

CREATE TABLE t1 (
  a INT,
  b INT
) ENGINE = MyISAM;

CREATE TABLE t2 (
  a INT,
  b INT
) ENGINE = MyISAM;

CREATE TABLE t3 (
  a INT,
  b TINYINT
) ENGINE = MyISAM;

CREATE TABLE t_mrg (
  a INT,
  b INT
) ENGINE = MERGE,UNION=(t1,t2,t3);

SELECT * FROM t_mrg;
ERROR 1168 (HY000): Unable to open underlying table which is differently defined
 or of non-MyISAM type or doesn't exist

To find out what's wrong, we'll use a CHECK TABLE:

CHECK TABLE t_mrg;
+------------+-------+----------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Table      | Op    | Msg_type | Msg_text                                                      |
+------------+-------+----------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| test.t_mrg | check | Error    | Table 'test.t3' is differently defined or of non-MyISAM type or doesn't exist                       |
| test.t_mrg | check | Error    | Unable to open underlying table which is differently defined or of non-MyISAM type or doesn't exist |
| test.t_mrg | check | error    | Corrupt                                                      |
+------------+-------+----------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Now, we know that the problem is in t3's definition.