Michael Prasuhn wrote:
A lot of confusion here, from others, not just Daniel. Overall the biggest benefit is that InnoDB supports row-level locking versus table-locking on writes.
Could you confirm that row-level locking means that you can do multiple INSERTs at the same time?
Suppose that you are going to do 50 INSERTs in one transaction (my non-Drupal site does this at one place). Can two users do the 50-INSERT operation at the same time? (the application is a markbook/gradebook - the inserts are the marks/grades for 50 students).
The downside is that for reading large amounts of simple data, InnoDB is slower than MyISAM. In fact MyISAM is probably one of the fastest engines out there in terms of reading data.
I thought that InnoDB was supposed to be faster for reading. At least, for reading rows that are related by index (e.g. users 1-20 assuming that "user id" is an index).
Also, while InnoDB is widely available these days, you may still run into hosts that don't support it, but do support MyISAM.
I'm not too worried about that because *my* host supports InnoDB.
Cheers, Daniel.