0

Considering the headaches of changing something that is working perfectly "as-is" and will never need to do more than it does now, is there any overwhelming reason to convert the MyIsam tables over to InnoDB just to upgrade the MySQL engine? This is a small database for PHP document storage.

I know "newer is better" and I am usually among the first proponents of upgrading anything. But this particular case could present a number of unexpected problems with the change and for what it is used for, there would be nothing to be gained. It would probably chug merrily along for another 5 years if just allowed to do so.

However, there may be elements that I am not taking into account that will force my hand one day and make it an "urgent necessity" which could be even worse. Could a case be made for leaving well enough alone for now as the whole layout will probably be replaced in a few years by something completely different anyway whether or not I do the conversions.

questorfla
  • 25
  • 6

1 Answers1

1

Yes. InnoDB tends to recover from server crashes (e.g, unexpected server reboots) more gracefully than MyISAM does. This means that it's less likely to need your help to keep it running.

The SQL-level interface to InnoDB is identical to MyISAM, so there's unlikely to be any reason to not convert it. You can convert a table to InnoDB using:

ALTER TABLE `tablename` ENGINE=InnoDB