Storage Engines MySQL - aeggermont/datastores GitHub Wiki

The Basics

This page documents two storage engines most commonly used in MySQL: innoDb and MyISAM.

MyISAM

• It is the older of the two engines. The main features are the following:
• Good engine for a read only workload
• Supports FULLTEXT data type which allows very fast searches of large quantities of text data.
• It is only capable of locking an entire table for writing. This means only one process can update a table at a time.
• It lacks of journaling which makes things difficult to recover

InnoDB

• It is more a modern database engine, designed to be ACID compliant which guarantees database transactions to be processes reliably.
• Write locking can occur on a row level basis within a table. This means multiple updates can occur on a single table simultaneously.
• Data caching is handled in memory within the database engine. allowing caching on a more efficient row level basis rather than file block.
• Transactions are journaled independently of the main tables. This allows for much reliable recovery as data consistency can be checked.