Re: MyISAM - Static or MyISAM - Dynamic

[Ingo Strüwing]

In my opinion, the key values are stored in a compressed form, which is
independent from the record layout. Every key has a pointer into the
data file. This is the byte offset for the beginning of the record in
the data file for dynamic tables or the number of the record in static
tables. The latter can be smaller. So I would expect that the indexes
for static tables could be a bit smaller than those for dynamic tables.

A small experiment could tell if I am right or wrong.

Anyway, dynamic tables should be faster in the users application as he
wants to do litte updates and will thus have little fragmentation. So it
is the data file size that matters in my opinion. The difference might
be small though if there are good indexes.

Regards

Ingo Strüwing, Senior Software Developer - Storage Engines
MySQL AB, www.mysql.com