MyISAM table. The MyISAM storage format has been the default type in MySQL since version 3.23 and has the following characteristics:
■ Files are larger than the ISAM storage method if the operating system itself allows larger files.
■ Data is stored in a little-byte-first, machine-independent format. This means that tables can be copied from one machine to another, even if their architectures are different.
■ Numeric index values take up less storage space because they are stored big byte first. The index value changes quickly in the lower bytes, so the higher bytes are easier to compare.
■ AUTO_INCREMENT handles tables better than ISAM. Details are discussed in Chapter 2.
■ Reduced several index limits. For example, you can index columns that contain NULL values, and you can also index columns of type BLOB and TEXT.
■ To improve table integrity checking, each table has a flag that is set after myisamchk has checked the table. You can use myisamchk -fast to make this administrative task faster by skipping checks on tables that have not been modified since the previous check. There is also a flag in the table that indicates whether the table was shut down gracefully. If the server shuts down abnormally, or the machine crashes, this flag can be used to detect the tables that need to be checked when the server starts.