MySQL - MyISAM or INODB?

[Guest]

Sorry if it's not the right place for this question.

I am using MySQL and I would like to know which format I should use for my databases . Should I go with the MyISAM format or the InoDB one?

Any help is welcome

[Me]

MyISAM for speed and INODB for reliability.

If you are about to store vital information in your DB, you should go with InoDB which provides better security mecanisms ... This doesn't mean MyISAM is no good, but just less.

About performances, if you do a lot of insert / update, I think InoDB is faster because it doesn't row locking whereas MyISAM does table locking (which prevent to modifications within the same table to occure at the same time).
But I am not totally sure, so may be someone else will be able to answer you more precisely.

[ManOnMoon]

I am fairly new to InnoDB but I came to a "problem" ... If I don't make mistake, ALL InnoDB databases/tables are stored into a single files (or two), so how can we backup DB ? Do we have to generate a SQL sequence ?

With MyISAM DB, I just copied the folders and the backup was done, which is very convenient and fast. It takes only few seconds/minutes... wherase with InnoDB it can takes hours to generate the SQL sequence and hours to play it...

Or may be I missed something?