upgrade from upgrade 1.6.x to 1.8.1. update hangs while altering history

[mattlf]

Hi

I am trying to upgrade from 1.6.x to 1.8.1

When running the update scripts, it has been hanging for few hours now on the following

... converting table history

and show processlist; shows the following

| 215 | root | localhost | zabbix | Query | 9020 | copy to tmp table | ALTER TABLE history CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci |

select count(*) history also hangs

I was wondering if i could safely interrupt the update script and eventually truncate the history table (I am willing to loose the history)

Did anybody run into this issue ?

Thank you

[mattlf]

ok It just took a long time because there are over 33 million rows in history table and also one needs to add ` to CREATE TABLE `expressions` in patch.sql