Can I change a MySQL table back and forth between InnoDB and MyISAM without any problems?

Posted by Daniel Magliola on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Daniel Magliola
Published on 2011-01-17T16:21:38Z Indexed on 2011/01/17 16:55 UTC
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Filed under:

mysql

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Performance

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migration

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innodb

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myisam

I have a site with a decently big database, 3Gb in size, a couple of tables with a dozen million records.

It's currently 100% on MyISAM, and I have the feeling that the server is going slower than it should because of too much locking, so I'd like to try going to InnoDB and see if that makes things better. However, I need to do that directly in production, because obviously without load this doesn't make any difference.

However, I'm a bit worried about this, because InnoDB actually has potential to be slower, so the question is:

If I convert all tables to InnoDB and it turns out i'm worse off than before, can I go back to MyISAM without losing anything?

Can you think of any problems I might encounter? (For example, I know that InnoDB stores all data in ONE big file that only gets bigger, can this be a problem?)

Thank you very much
Daniel

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