xdeb.org

Converting your Drupal MySQL databas from MyISAM to InnoDB

In Drupal 7 InnoDB will replace MyISAM as the default storage engine for increased scalability and data integrity. Most big sites are already using InnoDB, drupal.org does since some time.

InnoDB is generally a better choice for Drupal so why wait for Drupal 7. Lets go ahead and convert our Drupal 6 tables to InnoDB.

As always, make sure you have backups of everything before you do this on a production site!

Convert a database to InnoDB

Here follows some commands to run on the command line that will make the conversion a breeze.

The first command I found on “Ryan’s Tech Notes”, se below. It will generate a file with sql commands to altar every table in the specified databas to InnoDB.

The second command is a Perl one liner to set the search_* tables back to MyISAM. This is done for performance reasons and to avoid the large index that InnoDB will generate on these tables.

Update 2010-01-03: According to Steve Rude at divx.com the menu_router table should also be MyISAM for best performance.

The last command executes the sql commands that converts the tables to InnoDB.

mysql -u [USER_NAME] -p -e "SHOW TABLES IN [DATABASE_NAME];" | tail -n +2 | xargs -I '{}' echo "ALTER TABLE {} ENGINE=INNODB;" > alter_table.sql
perl -p -i -e 's/(search_[a-z_]+ ENGINE=)INNODB/\1MYISAM/g' alter_table.sql
mysql -u [USER_NAME] -p [DATABASE_NAME] < alter_table.sql

If you are using Drush, and you really should, you can use these commands instead.

cd /path/to/drupal/directory
drush sql-query "SHOW TABLES" | tail -n +2 | xargs -I '{}' echo "ALTER TABLE {} ENGINE=INNODB;" > alter_table.sql
perl -p -i -e 's/(search_[a-z_]+ ENGINE=)INNODB/\1MYISAM/g' alter_table.sql
cat alter_table.sql | `drush sql-connect`

If you have a big database it can take some minutes to convert all the tables to InnoDB.

InnoDB parameters

Here are the current InnoDB settings I use for the server xdeb.org runs on, a small VPS. The values you most likely need to adjust for your server is “innodb_buffer_pool_size” and “innodb_log_file_size”.

innodb_buffer_pool_size = 256M
innodb_additional_mem_pool_size = 10M
innodb_log_file_size = 32M
innodb_flush_method = O_DIRECT
innodb_file_per_table = 1
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 0

When changing innodb_log_file_size you will need to:

  1. Stop the MySQL server
  2. Move away ib_logfile0 and ib_logfile1 (On Debian they are in /var/lib/mysql)
  3. Change the innodb_log_file_size
  4. Restart the MySQL server
  5. Confirm new ib_logfile0 and ib_logfile1 has been created
  6. Have a look in the logs to make sure everything is in order.

Make sure to comment out “skip-innodb” in your MySQL config file if it exists.

#skip-innodb

If you want to make InnoDB the default storage engine for new tables, where no engine is specified, you can add this to your MySQL config file.

default-storage-engine = innodb

MyISAM only parameters

These are MyISAM only parameters that you most likely can set to lower values to save RAM now that most tables are converted to InnoDB.

  • bulk_insert_buffer_size
  • key_buffer_size
  • key_cache_age_threshold
  • key_cache_block_size
  • key_cache_division_limit
  • read_buffer_size
  • read_rnd_buffer_size