Migrating a table from MyISAM or Aria to InnoDB or XtraDB

The default storage engine of MariaDB is XtraDB, which is an enhanced version of InnoDB.

Getting ready

Import the ISFDB database as described in the Importing the data exported by mysqldump recipe in this chapter.

How to do it...

1. Open the mysql command-line client and connect to the isfdb database.

2. Run the following command line:

   ALTER TABLE awards ENGINE=InnoDB;
   

3. After the command line gets executed, a message similar to the following will be displayed:

   Query OK, 33102 rows affected (5.37 sec)
   Records: 33102  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 0
   

4. If our system is older or is under heavy load and it takes longer than 5 seconds for the ALTER TABLE command line execution to complete, we'll see a progress message letting us know how much of the task has been completed. The message gets updated every 5 seconds, until the task is finished.

How it works...

The ALTER TABLE command converts the table over in two stages. First, it creates a new table, identical...