Does Django's south (migration tool) work for innodb?

Question

$ py manage.py  migrate turkey
Running migrations for turkey:
 - Migrating forwards to 0001_initial.
 > turkey:0001_initial
 ! Error found during real run of migr         


        

Answer 1

See also https://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/AlterModelOnSyncDB

I have had the same kind of error happen to me when working with a mysql setup whose default table storage engine is MyISAM and I wanted to use InnoDB (using the recipe found in above link, we used the post_syncdb signal to trigger the conversion code). However, when using South to create new tables they were first created using MyISAM engine then later converted. I was mistakenly believing InnoDB tables weren't doing what they were supposed to, when those were actually MyISAM; because the table were converted by the signal, any migration error would fail to unapply :-/

If you need to use or create InnoDB tables where the default is MyISAM, this be solved with:

# add at the beginning of your migration
if db.backend_name == 'mysql':
   db.execute('SET storage_engine=INNODB')

or if you do not mind the performance hit:

# add this to settings.py
DATABASE_OPTIONS = {
   "init_command": "SET storage_engine=INNODB", # XXX: performance hit...
}