install script & db table type

[StevenJ]

I am writing an install script for my app, and have come to write the set up for the DB which would be created on the users MySQL Host/Machine.

In looking what I have, I have found that I have two types of table.........

MyISAM
InnoDB

further more, I have two types of Collation

utf8_bin
latin1_swedish_ci

One reason for this might be that I have used phpMyAdmin to create the DB while developing the app for reasons of speed - but my MySQL knowledge is clearly lacking, as I don't know what I should use...........

can anyone offer advise, and reasons for choice?

The app is intened only to be used with european charactersets...........

Kind regards

[bpat1434]

Well, if it's to be used with european charactersets, then I'd say convert your tables to utf8_bin. AFIK latin1_swedish_ci is the typical ISO-8859-1 standard character set (so US English essentially). I'm not a big language guy, so I can't be 100% sure about the similarities between ISO and US English 😉

Anyway... the data type isn't going to really slow you down. What will slow you down is unoptimized tables, bad indices, and bad queries.