Innodb Vs Myisam In Regards To The The Latest Announcement

[lhorace]

Hey,

 

The admins have recommended that users should switch to using MyISAM instead of InnoDB. In my experience, MyISAM has been the quickest and most efficient than InnoDB. Unfortunately, the only side effect are so few applications that actually support MyISAM. Quite a lot of modern applications only depends on technologies provided only by InnoDB

 

What a conundrum!

 

Regards

[wolstech]

I've not had any issues installing something using InnoDB then converting it's DB afterwards. I'm sure applications that won't work like this do exist, but they seem to be rather rare.

 

For most, it's more because many programs have install scripts are just coded to import tables that are defined using it...the tables themselves don't care what format they are in, and the program using them is usually none the wiser if you change the engine, provided the schema stays the same.

[Tjoene]

The main reason why I prefer InnoDB over MyISAM is foreign keys. While you can create relationship with MyISAM too, you'll need to do manually.

I suspect that is also why other applications require InnoDB as a database.

 

There are several other differences as well, see http://stackoverflow.com/a/1970169/1656617

[wolstech]

There is an advantage there, but it's far from mandatory in many cases. I have at least one application on my account that was adamant it needed InnoDB...it's been running on MyISAM for a year with zero issues. Full foreign key support/enforcement in the database is nice, but a decently-written program should be able to handle bad foreign keys without choking (granted it means the database isn't strictly valid...)

 

All bets are off if Transactions are needed though...MyISAM doesn't understand them.

 

If Inno didn't blow up as often as it does, I'd be more inclined to use it. The first crash here had me lose 2 months of data (had to restore a stale backup). Everything was converted to MyISAM then except some less-important applications. Those broke last week and ended up needing (recent 3-week-old) backups restored.

[incog]

I know that InnoDB can store many files for a single table (so if you lose one of these files, the majority of data should be alright) while MyISAM stores one file per table (I guess, if you've lost a file, everything's gonna break). The problem is, why does HelioHost say that InnoDB is fragile and recommends MyISAM as a replacement? Or am I missing something? (I'm no expert in databases, just curious)