It is a system for file management developed by IBM, which allows records to access sequentially or even randomly.

ISAM stands for Indexed Sequential Access Method. It’s a file organization method used for managing indexes and data within databases. However, in the context of MySQL, ISAM was a storage engine used in older versions of MySQL for handling tables. It provided fast access to data but lacked some features like transactions and foreign keys. It has largely been replaced by the more robust InnoDB storage engine in modern versions of MySQL.