MyISAM

• Not *ACID compliant and non-transactional
• MySQL 5.0 Default Engine
• Offers Compression
• Requires full repair/rebuild of indexes/tables
• Changed Db pages written to disk instantly
• No ordering in storage of data
• Table level locking

Innodb

• *ACID compliant and hence fully transactional with ROLLBACK and COMMIT and support for Foreign Keys
• Rackspace Cloud Default Engine
• Offers Compression
• Auto recovery from crash via replay of logs
• Dirty pages converted from random to sequential before commit and flush to disk
• Row data stored in pages in PK order
• Row level locking