14.6.5.4 Converting Tables from MyISAM to InnoDB

To convert a non-InnoDB table to use InnoDB use ALTER TABLE:

ALTER TABLE table_name ENGINE=InnoDB;

Important

Do not convert MySQL system tables in the mysql database (such as user or host) to the InnoDB type. This is an unsupported operation. The system tables must always be of the MyISAM type.

InnoDB does not have a special optimization for separate index creation the way the MyISAM storage engine does. Therefore, it does not pay to export and import the table and create indexes afterward. The fastest way to alter a table to InnoDB is to do the inserts directly to an InnoDB table. That is, use ALTER TABLE ... ENGINE=INNODB, or create an empty InnoDB table with identical definitions and insert the rows with INSERT INTO ... SELECT * FROM ....

If you have UNIQUE constraints on secondary keys, you can speed up a table import by turning off the uniqueness checks temporarily during the import operation:

SET unique_checks=0;
... import operation ...
SET unique_checks=1;

For big tables, this saves disk I/O because InnoDB can use its insert buffer to write secondary index records as a batch. Be certain that the data contains no duplicate keys. unique_checks permits but does not require storage engines to ignore duplicate keys.

To get better control over the insertion process, you might insert big tables in pieces:

INSERT INTO newtable SELECT * FROM oldtable
   WHERE yourkey > something AND yourkey <= somethingelse;

After all records have been inserted, you can rename the tables.

During the conversion of big tables, increase the size of the InnoDB buffer pool to reduce disk I/O, to a maximum of 80% of physical memory. You can also increase the sizes of the InnoDB log files.

Make sure that you do not fill up the tablespace: InnoDB tables require a lot more disk space than MyISAM tables. If an ALTER TABLE operation runs out of space, it starts a rollback, and that can take hours if it is disk-bound. For inserts, InnoDB uses the insert buffer to merge secondary index records to indexes in batches. That saves a lot of disk I/O. For rollback, no such mechanism is used, and the rollback can take 30 times longer than the insertion.

In the case of a runaway rollback, if you do not have valuable data in your database, it may be advisable to kill the database process rather than wait for millions of disk I/O operations to complete. For the complete procedure, see Section 14.6.11.2, “Forcing InnoDB Recovery”.

If you want all new user-created tables to use the InnoDB storage engine, add the line default-storage-engine=innodb to the [mysqld] section of your server option file.