Can I change from MyISAM to InnoDB

[trentster]

Hi I have been reading a lot of threads about using "InnoDB" for mysql, innitially I followed a howto for Centos 5 and it seems by default this is using MyISAM for mysql. I would like to change over to "InnoDB" and would like to know if this is possible with existing data in the database, and if advisable, is there anything steps that need to be followed to proceed with this change?

Thanks In Advance

[Alexei]

It depends on size of you database, normally you can:

1. mysqldump database structure and data to a file
2. create database with type=innodb
3. load everything into the new database from the file

[Niels]

Or you can first try to change a couple of tables with something like

ALTER TABLE tablename ENGINE=InnoDB

A backup would probably be good...

[Alexei]

Or you can first try to change a couple of tables with something like

ALTER TABLE tablename ENGINE=InnoDB

A backup would probably be good...

Hmm, interesting how MySQL handles transactions and memory structures when one table is MyISAM and other InnoDB... I would switch the whole database to InnoDB to avoid possible problems (if there are any of course).

[0siris]

I know I'm kicking an ancient topic, but I got to this topic using the search, perhaps someone else can use my answer
I used the following on our Linux server to convert a mysqldump file into innodb:

sed 's/ENGINE=MyISAM/ENGINE=InnoDB/g' mysqldump > mysqldump_innodb