Important: Do not convert MySQL system tables in the mysql database (such as user or host) to the InnoDB type. This is an unsupported operation. The system tables must always be of the MyISAM type.

If you want all your (non-system) tables to be created as InnoDB tables, you can simply add the line default-storage-engine=innodb to the [mysqld] section of your server option file.

InnoDB does not have a special optimization for separate index creation the way the MyISAM storage engine does. Therefore, it does not pay to export and import the table and create indexes afterward. The fastest way to alter a table to InnoDB is to do the inserts directly to an InnoDB table. That is, use ALTER TABLE ... ENGINE=INNODB, or create an empty InnoDB table with identical definitions and insert the rows with INSERT INTO ... SELECT * FROM ....

If you have UNIQUE constraints on secondary keys, you can speed up a table import by turning off the uniqueness checks temporarily during the import operation:

SET UNIQUE_CHECKS=0;
... import operation ...
SET UNIQUE_CHECKS=1;

For big tables, this saves a lot of disk I/O because InnoDB can then use its insert buffer to write secondary index records as a batch.

To get better control over the insertion process, it might be good to insert big tables in pieces:

INSERT INTO newtable SELECT * FROM oldtable
   WHERE yourkey > something AND yourkey <= somethingelse;

After all records have been inserted, you can rename the tables.

During the conversion of big tables, you should increase the size of the InnoDB buffer pool to reduce disk I/O. Do not use more than 80% of the physical memory, though. You can also increase the sizes of the InnoDB log files.

Make sure that you do not fill up the tablespace: InnoDB tables require a lot more disk space than MyISAM tables. If an ALTER TABLE operation runs out of space, it starts a rollback, and that can take hours if it is disk-bound. For inserts, InnoDB uses the insert buffer to merge secondary index records to indexes in batches. That saves a lot of disk I/O. For rollback, no such mechanism is used, and the rollback can take 30 times longer than the insertion.

In the case of a runaway rollback, if you do not have valuable data in your database, it may be advisable to kill the database process rather than wait for millions of disk I/O operations to complete. For the complete procedure, see Section 14.2.8.1, “Forcing InnoDB Recovery”.