See Chapter 18, Alternative Storage Engines. That chapter contains information about all MySQL storage engines except for the InnoDB storage engine and the NDB storage engine (used for MySQL Cluster). InnoDB is covered in Chapter 17, The InnoDB Storage Engine. NDB is covered in Chapter 25, MySQL NDB Cluster 8.0.

No. InnoDB is the default storage engine for new tables. See Section 17.1, “Introduction to InnoDB” for details.

The PARTITION storage engine plugin which provided partitioning support is replaced by a native partitioning handler. As part of this change, the server can no longer be built using -DWITH_PARTITION_STORAGE_ENGINE. partition is also no longer displayed in the output of SHOW PLUGINS, or shown in the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.PLUGINS table.

In order to support partitioning of a given table, the storage engine used for the table must now provide its own (“native”) partitioning handler. InnoDB is the only storage engine supported in MySQL 8.0 that includes a native partitioning handler. An attempt to create partitioned tables in MySQL 8.0 using any other storage engine fails. (The NDB storage engine used by MySQL Cluster also provides its own partitioning handler, but is currently not supported by MySQL 8.0.)

Yes. The disabled_storage_engines configuration option defines which storage engines cannot be used to create tables or tablespaces. By default, disabled_storage_engines is empty (no engines disabled), but it can be set to a comma-separated list of one or more engines.

Yes. Using InnoDB tables exclusively can simplify backup and recovery operations. MySQL Enterprise Backup does a hot backup of all tables that use the InnoDB storage engine. For tables using MyISAM or other non-InnoDB storage engines, it does a “warm” backup, where the database continues to run, but those tables cannot be modified while being backed up. See Section 32.1, “MySQL Enterprise Backup Overview”.

The ARCHIVE storage engine stores large amounts of data without indexes; it has a small footprint, and performs selects using table scans. See Section 18.5, “The ARCHIVE Storage Engine”, for details.