No transaction support in MySQL?

[rmd6502]

I developed a website which tested fine on my desktop computer, but when I posted it to HostGator I found that error records (testing filling in bad fields in the form) would cause duplicate entries in the database.
The culprit turned out to be that my tables were in MyISAM, which doesn't support transactions. Okay, no problem, I'll migrate to InnoDB. Turns out InnoDB is intentionally disabled, because of unspecified backup problems.

Entering "SHOW ENGINES" reveals that the Berkeley DB storage engine, the only other that supports transactions, is also disabled.
If I'm told that I have access to a database, I assume that that database will support begin/commit/rollback. InnoDB and BerkeleyDB have been around for at least a decade, I'm sure _someone_ has figured out how to back them up by now.

[GatorDHanna]

I'm sorry to hear that you've had trouble getting your databases to work like you expected. I'm going to ask one of our system administrators to reply to this thread with an explanation and some more information.

[GatorDHanna]

I spoke to one of our system senior administrators who told me this:

InnoDB has had a history of being a unstable storage engine and InnoDB tables are very prone to become corrupt and unrepairable. In fact, we have had instances in the past where customer's dedicated servers and shared machines lost quite a bit of transaction data with the InnoDB. Due to the stability and reliability of the MyISAM engine, it is the storage engine of choice for us.

Berkeley DB is considered a legacy storage engine and is not installed by default on most MySQL installations. It has been easier for us to keep up to date and support just one storage engine, which in our case is MyISAM.

If you really do need InnoDB, send us an email referencing this thread and we can probably find you a server that still has InnoDB installed on it.

Hopefully that helps. Please accept my apologies for the confusion and the frustration.

[rmd6502]

Just made this request, ticket #JAS-3028168, which was rejected.

What do I need to do to get this taken care of? I absolutely need transaction support for my application. I am willing to take the risk, and will add a daily mysqldump via cron to ensure this works.

[rmd6502]

I did a Google search to research the details of the corruption, and at least for most of the reported cases the root cause turned out to be that InnoDB is fairly sensitive to filesystem corruption caused by hard shutdown or disk hardware failure.

I have personally used InnoDB for some smaller applications and have not had a problem.

If someone there can send me some links detailing other causes I would appreciate it.

[GatorDHanna]

It looks like your account was moved over to a server that supported InnoDB. Could you confirm that here?

[rmd6502]

Just tried it out, and it works perfectly!
Thanks!

[GatorBrent]

I'm moving this to the shared hosting support forum.

Thanks!

[xactrecords]

I really need this for my reseller account as well. Who should I contact?

[GatorFord]

Originally Posted by xactrecords

I really need this for my reseller account as well. Who should I contact?

While we did do this in the past, at this time we've decided to longer perform these moves due to the amount of work required to migrate a reseller account, all subaccounts, and conversion of databases from MyISAM to InnoDB this is simply not a request we're continuing to perform for several reasons. One of these issues is the amount of problems that can come along with a migration (especially of a reseller account) with changes to DNS being the largest issue depending on how many domains you have, and conflicting usernames between reseller servers also being a large problem. The only option we are offerring right now for customers who'd like to use InnoDB instead of MyISAM is on dedicated servers only unless they are currently on a legacy machine that still supports it.

If you'd like to get a dedicated server setup with InnoDB instead of MyISAM we can perform this but I'll again warn you that this is a storage engine that is much more prone to data loss in our experience so this is why we no longer provide support for it with the exception of dedicated servers. Please let me know if you have any other questions. Thanks.