11–20 of 21 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't agree. MyISAM tables are easy to trash, and the table locking on update can bite you. There's no real disadvantage to using InnoDB other than having to learn to tune it a litte bit, and your data will be much safer.
Define 'easy to trash'. I've been using MyISAM without problems for years now.
1. Yank power cord while db writes are happening.
2. Grow the tables over a couple of GB in size.
I'm still not sure why folks still use MyISAM. I'm sure there may be some edge case where it makes more sense, but in generally InnoDB seems like a better choice (not just regarding row level locking). Or postgres:)
1. The MyISAM/InnoDB debate is so stale it stinks. If you're using MySQL, you should be using InnoDB unless you know exactly why you should use MyISAM. None of these issues are relevant until you have alot of concurrency and uptime/transactions/integrity are radically more important than potentially faster SELECT statements on MyISAM.
2. Did HN really just put this flaccid article to the top of the list? Aren't we more technical than this?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've yet to find a good comparison of the two. In fact, from what I've seen it seems better to use MyISAM when you don't need support for ACID transactions.
I don't agree. MyISAM tables are easy to trash, and the table locking on update can bite you. There's no real disadvantage to using InnoDB other than having to learn to tune it a litte bit, and your data will be much safer.
Hopefully compressed tables will improve matters.
I'm still not sure why folks still use MyISAM. I'm sure there may be some edge case where it makes more sense, but in generally InnoDB seems like a better choice (not just regarding row level locking). Or postgres:)
Man this is annoying: 1. The MyISAM/InnoDB debate is so stale it stinks. If you're using MySQL, you should be using InnoDB unless you know exactly why you should use MyISAM. None of these issues are relevant until you have alot of concurrency and uptime/transactions/integrity are radically more important than potentially faster SELECT statements on MyISAM. 2. Did HN really just put this flaccid article to the top of…
Having said that, the newer InnoDB plugins support compression, with partitioning you don't need MRG_MyISAM, and you can use something like Sphinx for full text searching, which integrates nicely into MySQL.
I'm still not sure why folks still use MyISAM. I'm sure there may be some edge case where it makes more sense, but in generally InnoDB seems like a better choice (not just regarding row level locking). Or postgres:)
I've yet to find a good comparison of the two. In fact, from what I've seen it seems better to use MyISAM when you don't need support for ACID transactions.
The big turn-off for me with MyISAM is that I can run a script to create some tables and setup for FK dependancies, and it will happily run it without errors, but won't enforce the constraints I created. Terrible behavior. I need foreign keys, transactions, row locking, etc...
Of course I now happily use PostgreSQL:)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't agree. MyISAM tables are easy to trash, and the table locking on update can bite you. There's no real disadvantage to using InnoDB other than having to learn to tune it a litte bit, and your data will be much safer.
Define 'easy to trash'. I've been using MyISAM without problems for years now.
I'm still not sure why folks still use MyISAM. I'm sure there may be some edge case where it makes more sense, but in generally InnoDB seems like a better choice (not just regarding row level locking). Or postgres:)
I've yet to find a good comparison of the two. In fact, from what I've seen it seems better to use MyISAM when you don't need support for ACID transactions.
I spent some time optimising it, not a lot of time, maybe a few hours over the course of a year. And even then mostly due to changing machines. It was quite easy to do, reading the manual page and increasing some buffers and so on. Nothing too complex.
We were running into problems in terms of server capacity. On the advise of a friend and just about every comparison on the Internet (notable exception there is the MySQL manual, BTW), we thought we'd give InnoDB a try. I read up on some of the configuration parameters, set some things to values that seemed sane and did a conversion.
Converting from MyISAM to InnoDB took over one hour for one database of about 800M. The server nearly died from that experiment. (Even though only one/tenth of the databases were switched over to InnoDB. The rest was still on MyISAM.) After a few hours to make sure it wasn't an accident, we switched back to MyISAM.
The most concise summary of the performance difference is probably given by comparing the conversion times. From MyISAM to InnoDB took over one hour (1 hour, 8 minutes, 10.74 seconds to be exact). From InnoDB to MyISAM took 2 minutes and 15.35 seconds.
The results were pretty terrible. Ever since I'm convinced InnoDB does not work well with our environment and application.