Re: Thoughts on partitioning by hour - and which partition type?

[Phil Hildebrand]

InnoDB supports transactions, so that should go into the decision as to which engine you need (MyISAM is not transactional with 5.1)

A decent comparison is here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/storage-engine-choosing.html

Another reason for InnoDB is the ability to have row level locking.

In general, if you're working on a datawarehouse, which are often used almost exclusively for reads and aggregation, with most bulk loads / updates off hours, then MyISAM is a great engine, as it doesn't have a lot of the overhead needed to support transactions and multi-version non-locking consistent reads, etc.

MyISAM also has some nice features for separating partitions and indexes over separate disks (which, depending on your disk architecture can have significant I/O performance improvements).