MySQL Data Engines comparison - MyIsam Vs Innodb Vs Memory

Feature	MyISAM	InnoDB	Memory
ACID Transaction ACID - Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability (read more on it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACID)	No	Yes	No
Configurable ACID Properties	No	Yes	No
Crash Safe	No	Yes	No (RAM)
Foreign Key Support	No	Yes	No
Multi Version Concurrency Control (MVCC)	No	Yes	No
Geospatial datatype	Yes	Yes	No
Geospatial indexing	Yes	No	No
Full-text Search Index	Yes	No	No
Data Cache	No	Yes	N/A
Compressed Data	Yes	Yes	No
Storage Limits	256TB	64TB	RAM
Storage Cost	Low	High	N/A
Memory Cost	Low	High	Medium
Locking Granularity	Table	Row	Table

MyISAM:
The MyISAM storage engine in MySQL.

• Simpler to design and create, thus better for beginners. No worries about the foreign relationships between tables.
• Faster than InnoDB on the whole as a result of the simpler structure thus much less costs of server resources.
• Full-text indexing.
• Especially good for read-intensive (select) tables.

InnoDB:
The InnoDB storage engine in MySQL.

• Support for transactions (giving you support for the ACID property).
• Row-level locking. Having a more fine grained locking-mechanism gives you higher concurrency compared to, for instance, MyISAM.
• Foreign key constraints. Allowing you to let the database ensure the integrity of the state of the database, and the relationships between tables.
• InnoDB is more resistant to table corruption than MyISAM.
• Support for large buffer pool for both data and indexes. MyISAM key buffer is only for indexes.
• MyISAM is stagnant; all future enhancements will be in InnoDB

MyISAM Limitations:

• No foreign keys and cascading deletes/updates
• No transactional integrity (ACID compliance)
• No rollback abilities
• Row limit of 4,284,867,296 rows (232)
• Maximum of 64 indexes per row

InnoDB Limitations:

• No full text indexing (Below-5.6 mysql version)
• Cannot be compressed for fast, read-only