Question

I have a customer, middle, items type database.

Customers can buy many items and this is stored in the “middle” table, with just the two columns with customerid and itemid.

I am currently using myisam for all tables.

Is it recommended to use Innodb for the middle table in this structure?

Answer 1

I would prefer InnoDB in this case because:

InnoDB should be used where data integrity comes a priority because it inherently takes care of them by the help of relationship constraints and transactions.
Faster in write-intensive (inserts, updates) tables because it utilizes row-level locking and only hold up changes to the same row that’s being inserted or updated.

While,

MyISAM is simpler to design and create, thus better for beginners.
No worries about the foreign relationships between tables.
Faster than InnoDB on the whole as a result of the simpler structure thus much less costs of server resources.
Full-text indexing.
Especially good for read-intensive (select) tables.

The comparison is pretty straightforward. InnoDB is more suitable for data critical situations that require frequent inserts and updates. MyISAM, on the other hand, performs better with applications that don’t quite depend on the data integrity and mostly just select and display the data.

Hope this helps.