[support] MyISAM vs InnoDB

[Daniel Carrera]

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.