I have spent some time researching on InnoDB row formats and InnoDB compression. This article is about things that I have learned. InnoDB file format and row format There are 2 file formats, Antelope and Barracuda, with the latter being the newer. Antelope supports row formats Redundant and Compact, whereas Barracuda supports 2 more, Dynamic and Compressed. Dynamic vs Compact Compact is the default row format in MySQL 5.6. The difference between Compact and Dynamic is the handling of BLOBs (including BLOB, TEXT, VARCHAR, etc).