MyISAM
Posted by Joel Thu, 31 Aug 2006 00:10:00 GMT
So I'm switching some of our production tables over to MyISAM. This is a pretty radical shift for me. I used to be a big PostgreSQL advocate, but now that I'm working on such a big site, it's all about speed. And MySQL is just much faster.
And why MyISAM over InnoDB? Because I don't need foreign key constraints. And I don't need transactions. All that stuff looks good on paper, but in reality, it comes at a huge performance hit. And for what? It helps you detect bugs. In short, it's basically like running your production application in debug mode to use an ACID-compliant database.
Any sort of validation, on delete cascade, anything can be done on the application layer if you really need it, but when's the last time you have ever really had data integrity issues that didn't become obvious quickly? Ultimately we're talking about application errors being caught at the database level, and that's a convenience that just isn't worth the cost.
The main cause of this is that I want to use the Fulltext indexing in MySQL and it is only supported by MyISAM.
