[support] MyISAM vs InnoDB

[Ivan Sergio Borgonovo]

On Mon, 23 Mar 2009 09:34:57 -0400
Earnie Boyd <earnie at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:

> > Of course data integrity is not just about content of tables.
> >
> 
> This is why the issue I pointed you to is so important.
> 
> >> > - if you're using advanced features, you're constrained by
> >> >   concurrent writes, you can't afford data loss and you didn't
> >> >   invest too much in MySQL there are better engines to look at.
> >>
> >> Out of curiosity, what would you suggest? No, I'm not looking to
> >> leave MySQL but I always enjoy learning a little more about
> >> databases.
> >
> > PostgreSQL... but really it depends on your needs.
> 
> If only ANSI syntax is used then it shouldn't really matter which 
> transactional DB is used as long is the engine supports ANSI 
> transactional syntax.  A transactional DB would allow for less PHP
> code to be needed and a benefit would be the amount of disk i/o would
> be lessened.

yeah... but is putting the bar much higher in terms of requirements...
that won't make InnoDB just default but required.
And it is not just a matter of transactions of course.
Once you're in that league you may exploit many other features...

But still if you want to keep supporting MyISAM and you want the DB to
take care of relational integrity and such if possible... you're going
to do twice the work if you still want to support MyISAM and sqlite.

Maybe in the future there won't be any good reason to have half-RDBMS
around so support for half-RDBMS could be dropped... but right now
MyISAM and sqlite have their use case, and somehow dropping support for
2 out of 4 supported DB is not going to make DB abstraction any better
right now.