I used to debate the pros/cons of both MyISAM and Blobs. Hate them both, because I am a constraint freak (ask LE, I may have convinced our team to use InnoDB for FK constraints ;)). Saves a lot of processing time cascading updates/deletes within MySQL than having an executable run 15 update/delete queries, but again, just my opinion based on my own analysis and research.

I hate the blobs simply because they are... blobs. Unreadable, unless you convert them... and, well, blobby. It shouldn't matter how the data is stored in the DB, as long as the server/client talk the same blobby language.

And you're right, probably not the place to debate it. But I am still thinking of KM's issue, not really sure why he'd be seeing such poor performance unless the hardware is just utter crap.

Adding indexes to table columns that are often sorted or filtered by can yield a huge performance boost in tables that are read from often but added to rarely (adding a record takes longer with a large table containing many indexes to update).