differences between “MYISAM” database storage engine and “ISAM” index

Question

what is the differences between "MYISAM" database storage engine and "ISAM" index? What is the relation between these two concepts? any reading resources? TNX.

Answer 1

Well, the main difference is in the way they store data. MyISAM table storage stores its data in machine independant format, placing the low byte first which means if necessary, you could copy them to tables on a different machine. There are a few differences, apart from that, one of them is the ability to index TEXT and BLOB type columns, as well as index columns that contain NULL values. With MyISAM, you can work with larger files than with ISAM. It has a better AUTO_INCREMENT handling, and a better table integrity check.

MySQL - The MyISAM Storage Engine