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Why is myisam storage engine is faster than Innodb storage engine

what makes it to be faster and innodb to be slow?

Naveen Kumar
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    MyISAM is NOT faster than InnoDB. That is a total myth. Way, way back in the way back days when InnoDB was brand-new and not fully formed, MyISAM was faster for reads only. It was never faster for writes, and it has always been more fragile. Writing to a MyISAM table causes the entire table to be locked during the write. The list is long... All the recent benchmarks all show that InnoDB is substantially faster than MyISAM for both reads and writes. InnoDB has been the default storage engine for MySQL for some time now. I can't think of a good reason to use MyISAM. – Craig Tullis Dec 05 '13 at 07:24
  • (...for typical workloads) – Craig Tullis Dec 05 '13 at 07:34

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MyISAM can be faster than innodb because it has a simpler design. Also it has been around a much longer time, and has more time to accumulate incremental improvements and optimizations based on data on real usage.

Design of MyISAM is based on ISAM: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISAM

The speed comes with a price though: MyISAM does not support transactions or foreign keys. This means it is optimal for example for saving and analyzing log data, and as a backend for data mining and data warehouse technologies, while innodb is better for transaction processing and as the storage layer of information systems in general.

Wikipedia has a nice comparison of MySQL storage engines here: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_MySQL_database_engines

Joni
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