Few days back for an application development by my team, I needed to research on this. Problem was we have 8 million places zip code, the data is updated 3 times per day - but it's not working fast enough, and sometimes even the kernel fails at the of update. I found it is using InnoDB engine by default. MyISAM offers speed whereas Innodb offers reliability. MyISAM is fast but with no transactions Click Here to Read More >>