The redo log is a disk-based data structure used during crash recovery to correct data written by incomplete transactions. During normal operations, the redo log encodes requests to change InnoDB table data that result from SQL statements or low-level API calls. Modifications that did not finish updating the data files before an unexpected shutdown are replayed automatically during initialization, and before the connections are accepted. For information about the role of the redo log in crash recovery, see Section 14.21.1, “The InnoDB Recovery Process”.

By default, the redo log is physically represented on disk as a set of files, named ib_logfile0 and ib_logfile1. MySQL writes to the redo log files in a circular fashion. Data in the redo log is encoded in terms of records affected; this data is collectively referred to as redo. The passage of data through the redo log is represented by an ever-increasing LSN value.

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