Best way to count the number of rows

[eluser]Cro_Crx[/eluser]
Hey everyone

I'm creating a web page application where users can submit answers to questions that are posted. At the moment i'm still in the development stages.

In my application I need to count the number of answers to each question. I'm using MySQL with the MyISAM storage engine (as users will be viewing records a lot more than writing to the datbase so i'm told MyISAM is a better choice).

I've denormalized the database by adding a total_answers in the questions table (so i don't have to count the number of answers for each question on every page load.

I was planning on using transactions to make sure that the count numbers were accurate so for example

Code:

Start transaction
Insert an answer
add 1 to the total_answers column in the questions table
stop transacation.

Although I've just realized that MyISAM doesn't actually support transactions, although apparently running count(*) statements are quick quite on MyISAM.

So my question is, would it be better to use InnoDB on all my database tables and use the total_column along with transactions to make sure they are accurate.

OR

Would it be best to just stick with MyISAM and use statements something like this:

Code:

SELECT Count(*) FROM 'answers' WHERE question_id = '5';

If you need some more information to be helpful just let me know... but yeah i'm unsure of which method to choose!