Can the MySQL system database tables be converted to InnoDB?

Question

I've installed MySQL 5.5 recently. I'm using InnoDB as the engine for all my databases. I noticed that the mysql database default and all of it's tables (user, db, etc...) are MyISAM. Is there any reason they cannot / should not be InnoDB? Does anyone know if MySQL requires the mysql db to be MyISAM?

Hynda

Answer 1

Warning Do not convert MySQL system tables in the mysql database from MyISAM to InnoDB tables! This is an unsupported operation. If you do this, MySQL does not restart until you restore the old system tables from a backup or re-generate them with the mysql_install_db script.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/innodb-restrictions.html

Laurentian

Absolutely. It's probably a bad idea to mess around with any of the system tables directly. – Pal

Nice. Good thing I asked :) Scary to think there is such a big way a user could easily shoot themselves in the foot. – Hynda

with power comes responsibility :) – Generalize