transactional and non-transactional storage engines

Some of MySQL's engine modes support transaction processing and some do not.

The current production engines in MySQL 5.0 that support transaction management are NDB/Cluster,

InnoDB (supplied by Oracle), and the

solidDB engine (supplied by Solid Information Technology).

A non-transaction engine can only fetch data from a database and display it, like a list of CD's or books in a library.

An engine that supports transaction processing can execute a task using server side functions.

Banking online is an example of a transaction processing engine. You access your account from the non-transacting script, the simple database. Once done the transaction engine takes over and manages your money as you choose.

MySQL has also introduced (3 years ago) a new transactional storage engine - code named Falcon.

Falcon is a next-generation transactional management engine designed to run on all popular hardware/architecture platforms.

See for more info:
mysqlperformanceblog.com/2007/01/12/falcon-storage-engine-design-review/