Tabular comparison of MYISAM INNODB

FACTOR	INNODB	MYISAM
Locking	Row Level	Table Level
Transaction	Allowed	Not Allowed
crash recovery	Reliable	Less Reliable
Referential integrity (FOREIGN KEYs)	Supported	Not Supported
Insert / Updates Speed	Faster because of row level locking	slower because of table level locking
Concurrent Insertion	If update/inserted rows are different , then the operation can be perormed simultanosly	No
Concurrent Updation	If update/inserted rows are different , then the operation can be perormed simultanosly	No
Concurent insert and updates	If update/inserted rows are different , then the operation can be perormed simultanosly	If a MyISAM table has no holes in the data file (deleted rows in the middle), an INSERT statement can be executed to add rows to the end of the table at the same time that SELECT statements are reading rows from the table. If there are multiple INSERT statements, they are queued and performed in sequence, concurrently with the SELECT statements.
Large number of selects as compared to inserts/delete	comparatively slow	fast
storage limit	1/4x than myisam	4x than innodb
full-text search	No	No
system resources	High	Low
Count(*)	speed is slow	Fast
Backing Up	Difficult	Easy,  just need to copy FRM , MYD & MYI files.