From: Todd Gillespie <toddg@...128.ma.utexas.edu>
Date: 2001-12-10T02:18:29+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:28034] Re: DBI and large result sets

Neil Conway <nconway@klamath.dyndns.org> wrote:
: On Sat, 2001-12-08 at 22:45, Albert Wagner wrote:
:> On Saturday 08 December 2001 09:28 pm, you wrote:
:> 
:> Why is it suggested that you avoid BerkeleyDB?

: IIRC, because you pay a speed, memory and disk space penalty over the
: default MySQL table type (MyISAM). In exchange, you get transactions,
: but if you don't need those (and MySQL users typically don't), then you
: may be better of without BDB tables.

This is a fallacious notion left over from the time when the MySQL
developers were knocking anything they couldn't code, in this case
transactions.  InnoDB is a transactional MySQL backend that is roughly as
fast as MyISAM in the single-user simple mysql-bench, and much, much
faster under any real load.  Mostly this is because MyISAM is
table-locking, and InnoDB is row-locking (which the MySQL team
knocked) and even uses MVCC; but a more general truth is that a theoretic
evaluation (trans vs not) is impaired by the details of implementation.