MySQL: the Pros and Cons of MyISAM Tables

MyISAM is good for read-only tables. It has very fast reads. Once you start getting writes, it crumbles. Since most web applications today have a decent amount of writes, MyISAM isn't that good.

So what is MyISAM good for? Well, let's say that you have a table of post codes. Maybe you want to add new ones every month, but for general purposes, it's read-only. You'll get MyISAM's speed for reads and writes won't matter.

On the other hand, say you're making a site like HN. In that case, you constantly have writes (votes, submissions, comments) and locking the table isn't an option as it would just crumble.

The article says that MyISAM is good if your application "has to be fast". That isn't true. Most applications would be faster with InnoDB. This article takes a completely inaccurate approach to databases. So, they'll be lots of people who read this and think, "faster is better, therefore I'll use MyISAM," when such a choice will give them lots of speed problems as users start using their app.

I think that the lack of foreign key constraints and transaction support needs to be emphasized more, especially considering who the audience is.