Convert MySQL table’s engine from MyISAM to InnoDB for Django models

When I tried using django-activity-stream for my Django project, I cannot use syncdb, so I migrate it using South. When testing something like :

>>> from actstream import action
>>> action.send(foo, verb='tested')

I got the following error:

IntegrityError: (1452, 'Cannot add or update a child row: a
foreign key constraint fails (`alexadb`.`actstream_action`,
CONSTRAINT `actor_content_type_id_refs_id_357b994e` FOREIGN
KEY (`actor_content_type_id`) REFERENCES `django_content_type`
(`id`))')

It seems the foreign key constraint fail is related to table django_content_type. Therefore, I ran the following MySQL command to check the engine of this table:

SHOW TABLE STATUS WHERE name='django_content_type';

The result for column ‘Engine’ is MyISAM, which is why it does not support foreign key constraint. One solution is to convert it to InnoDB. However, the following MySQL command seems to take a ‘very’ long time (even if it is not a very large table) that I cannot observe for about 5 minutes.

ALTER TABLE django_content_type ENGINE = InnoDB;

To make the conversion quicker, I have to use another solution, which is recreating the django_content_type table with its engine being InnoDB.

This requires the following steps:

1. In the project directory, dump the app model data associated with table django_content_type. This app and model name is contenttypes.ContentType(django.contrib.contenttypes.models.ContentType).

   $ python manage.py dumpdata contenttypes.ContentType > contenttypes.json
   

2. Drop table django_content_type in MySQL:

   DROP TABLE django_content_type;
   

3. Get SQL statement of model contenttypes.ContentType:

   $ python manage.py sqlall contenttypes
   BEGIN;
   CREATE TABLE `django_content_type` (
       `id` integer AUTO_INCREMENT NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
       `name` varchar(100) NOT NULL,
       `app_label` varchar(100) NOT NULL,
       `model` varchar(100) NOT NULL,
       UNIQUE (`app_label`, `model`)
   )
   ;
   
   COMMIT;
   

   Add Engine=InnoDB to the statement, and run this in MySQL:

   CREATE TABLE `django_content_type` (
       `id` integer AUTO_INCREMENT NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
       `name` varchar(100) NOT NULL,
       `app_label` varchar(100) NOT NULL,
       `model` varchar(100) NOT NULL,
       UNIQUE (`app_label`, `model`)
   ) ENGINE=InnoDB
   ;
   

4. Load dumped data into database:

   $ python manage.py loaddata contenttypes.json
   

5. Finally, the testing of django-activity-stream should work without errors:

   >>> from myapp.models import Foo
   >>> f = Foo.objects.get(id=1)
   >>> from actstream import action
   >>> action.send(f, verb='tested')
   [(<function action_handler at 0x1102ff410>, None)]