Question

Sometimes I got asked on some interviews: what benefits does InnoDB have against MyISAM and when MyISAM is better than InnoDB? It’s all clear about the first part of question: InnoDB is transaction compliant, row-level blocking instead of table-level blocking, foreign key support and some others, these points just came to mind immidiately.

But when MyISAM is really better than InnoDB?

Answer 1

MyISAM is better than InnoDB when you don’t need those advanced features and storage speed is more important than other concerns. MyISAM also allows full-text searches to be performed inside the database engine itself, instead of needing to query results and then search them as an array or whatever in your application.

InnoDB is a reasonable choice if you need to store data with a high degree of fidelity with complicated interactions and relationships. MyISAM is a reasonable choice if you need to save or load a large number of records in a small amount of time.

I wouldn’t recommend using MyISAM for data that matters. It’s great for logging or comments fields or anything where you don’t particularly care if a record vanishes into the twisting nether. InnoDB is good for when you care about your data, don’t need fast searches and have to use MySQL.

It’s also worth mentioning that InnoDB supports row-level locking, while MyISAM only supports table-level locking – which is to say that for many common situations, InnoDB can be dramatically faster due to more queries executing in parallel.

The bottom line: Use InnoDB unless you absolutely have to use MyISAM. Alternatively, develop against PostgreSQL and get the best of both.