A user named carrot has answered a number of queries concerning foreign keys, etc., by referring to tables of type INNODB. So I went and RTFM about INNODB. Quite enlightening in Theory.
Can somebody help make me (and others) smart about INNODB?
It looks like it's MySQL on steroids -- a lot more Oracle-like in many ways.
Looks like it has rollbacks? Start and Stop transactions? Am I reading this right? Can I believe it?
Looks like it's self healing after a crash, doing auto roll-forward to crash state?
Looks like it's a diskhog? Looks like you need to groom the diskspace regularly?
Looks like it CAN provide referential integrity checks. Cascading deletes, etc.
Integrity 'features' can end up being PITA's. I remember moving from Oracle 6 to 7 when integrity checking broke a ton of prewritten code -- you had to do inserts in an order consistent with referential integrity. Maybe you had to do inserts in 9 tables to complete the data. You'd have to arrange the inserts in Oracle-official order. Sometimes the logic behind the order was challenging to puzzle through, i.e. trial and error often proved faster than hours of diagrams.
BUT managing BIG (TB-size) db. Whhhhooo. Also ROLLBACKS...!WHOOHOOO.
Can I hear from anyone with an experience set with INNODB and particularly comparing it to current MySQL MyISAM type tables.
Is there a tutorial about this that I haven't been able to Google?
