I have some very large databases (some up to 150M rows) I'm working with & after initially inserting the data there isn't much INSERT's going on; just a lot of SELECT's & usage of JOINS.
I've been messing around with InfoBright a lot (the community version) & whilst I believe it is a good engine, I personally have been having some problems with it getting it to run like it should (fast).
So I was wondering if anyone else could recommend any other fast free storage engine for MySQL?
I'm just now checking out tokudb; is there anything else out there to check out as well?
Have you looked at Sphinx at all? While it is a search engine, it also supports query-less searches, which is similar to standard SELECT queries with indexes. I found it to be a huge help when dealing with large datasets. It's very fast, and is used heavily in high-traffic forums who are up in the millions (or hundreds of millions) of posts arena.
There is also a plugin for MySQL called SphinxSE which allows it to act as a MySQL storage engine which makes integration very easy to set up. You build your indexes by supplying the indexer program a query, and then once it's all set up, you can query it as if it was a normal table.
http://sphinxsearch.com/docs/2.0.1/sphinxse-overview.html (note, I haven't used it much since pre 1.0)