Falcon is a Storage Engine for the MySQL database server. A storage engine provides the mechanics for storing, indexing and retreiving information from the physical store of the data. Other storage engines available for MySQL include The InnoDB Storage Engine and The MyISAM Storage Engine. For more information on storage engines for MySQL, see Storage Engines and Table Types. For more detail on MySQL, see the MySQL 5.1 Reference Manual.

The Falcon Storage Engine has been designed with modern database requirements in mind, and particularly for use within high-volume web serving or other environment that requires high performance, while still supporting the transactional and logging functionality required in this environment.

Falcon is currently available only for the 32-bit Windows and 32-bit or 64-bit Linux operating systems. Additional platforms will be added after the alpha release.