This chapter describes several changes in the InnoDB storage engine that offer new flexibility and improve ease of use, reliability and performance. The “Barracuda” file format improves efficiency for storing large variable-length columns, and enables table compression. Configuration options that once were unchangeable after startup, are now flexible and can be changed dynamically. Some improvements are automatic, such as faster and more efficient TRUNCATE TABLE. Others allow you the flexibility to control InnoDB behaviour; for example, you can control whether certain problems cause errors or just warnings. And informational messages and error reporting continue to be made more user-friendly.