Why is MyISAM used and not InnoDB?

Joomla uses InnoDB as the engine for it's tables, but I have noticed that Hikashop uses MyISAM. This strictly hampers addition of Foreign keys for data integrity on deletions, and from my understanding MyISAM is not as robust as InnoDB.

So I would be interested to know what the reasoning behind using MyISAM is, and if changing the tables to use InnoDB would cause any issues.

When we started our work on HikaShop, Joomla 2.5 didn't exist. Joomla 1.5 was using MyISAM, so we did the same.

Why not use innoDB now ? Because it would probably require to change some of the code/queries to cope with the modification, no one expressed any problem with that choice so far, and we prefer to focus for now on fixing bugs and adding more features to HikaShop. HikaShop's architecture will evolve in the future. InnoDB might be part of that evolution, but I don't think that this is an urging topic.

Thank you for your reply Nicoals and for explaining the choice.

It would give better referential integrity and in cases of database problems allow better troubleshooting. But as you say it is not vital to the functionality of the product and I can see that it will not be a pressing issue.

In that case I may experiment in my own time if I think there is a need for any of the tables to be modified.

Again thanks for taking the time to reply.

Great ! Let us know your findings if you get the time.