The InnoDB storage engine maintains InnoDB tables within a tablespace that can be created from several files. This allows a table to exceed the maximum individual file size. The tablespace can include raw disk partitions, which allows extremely large tables. The maximum tablespace size is 64TB.

If you are using InnoDB tables and run out of room in the InnoDB tablespace. In this case, the solution is to extend the InnoDB tablespace. See Section 13.6.5, “Adding, Removing, or Resizing InnoDB Data and Log Files”.

You are using MyISAM tables on an operating system that supports files only up to 2GB in size and you have hit this limit for the data file or index file.

You are using a MyISAM table and the space required for the table exceeds what is allowed by the internal pointer size. MyISAM allows data and index files to grow up to 256TB by default, but this limit can be changed up to the maximum allowable size of 65,536TB (256⁷ – 1 bytes).

If you need a MyISAM table that is larger than the default limit and your operating system supports large files, the CREATE TABLE statement supports AVG_ROW_LENGTH and MAX_ROWS options. See Section 12.1.14, “CREATE TABLE Syntax”. The server uses these options to determine how large a table to allow.

If the pointer size is too small for an existing table, you can change the options with ALTER TABLE to increase a table's maximum allowable size. See Section 12.1.6, “ALTER TABLE Syntax”.

ALTER TABLE tbl_name MAX_ROWS=1000000000 AVG_ROW_LENGTH=nnn;

You have to specify AVG_ROW_LENGTH only for tables with BLOB or TEXT columns; in this case, MySQL can't optimize the space required based only on the number of rows.

To change the default size limit for MyISAM tables, set the myisam_data_pointer_size, which sets the number of bytes used for internal row pointers. The value is used to set the pointer size for new tables if you do not specify the MAX_ROWS option. The value of myisam_data_pointer_size can be from 2 to 7. A value of 4 allows tables up to 4GB; a value of 6 allows tables up to 256TB.

You can check the maximum data and index sizes by using this statement:

SHOW TABLE STATUS FROM db_name LIKE 'tbl_name';

You also can use myisamchk -dv /path/to/table-index-file. See Section 12.4.5, “SHOW Syntax”, or Section 4.6.3, “myisamchk — MyISAM Table-Maintenance Utility”.

Other ways to work around file-size limits for MyISAM tables are as follows:

You are using the MEMORY (HEAP) storage engine; in this case you need to increase the value of the max_heap_table_size system variable. See Section 5.1.4, “Server System Variables”.