Question

I have issues with using the MyISAM engine in my database. It is constantly corrupting and has severely varying query times. Thus I can not use it any more. I have found the InnoDB to be a good alternatve, but here is the problem:

 Engine         Support     Comment
 MyISAM         DEFAULT     Default engine as of MySQL 3.23 with great perform...
 MEMORY         YES         Hash based, stored in memory, useful for temporary...
 InnoDB         DISABLED    Supports transactions, row-level locking, and fore...
 BerkeleyDB     NO          Supports transactions and page-level locking
 BLACKHOLE      YES         /dev/null storage engine (anything you write to it...
 EXAMPLE        NO          Example storage engine
 ARCHIVE        YES         Archive storage engine
 CSV            YES         CSV storage engine
 ndbcluster     DISABLED    Clustered, fault-tolerant, memory-based tables
 FEDERATED      YES         Federated MySQL storage engine
 MRG_MYISAM     YES         Collection of identical MyISAM tables
 ISAM           NO          Obsolete storage engine

Hope that formats correctly

I have no power over the support for the different engines, so this is what I got to work with.

Am I basically in trouble? Or is there any of these that can do the trick? I have a DB that will hold potentially millions of entries and I need to perform “LIKE” operations on a “mediumtext” field (possibly fulltext search), and have a high insert/update rate into the db (at times in excess of 50 entries/second).

Answer 1

I’d say you’re in trouble, since you don’t have control over engines you can’t do anything.

However, for performing full text search on a big database could be done using Apache Lucene. As far as I know, it is faster and more scalable than any sql engine out there. It’s implemented in Java, but there are many other implementations including C, C++, .Net, Python, PHP, …