Can't drop table after creating table with wrong engine

Question

I'm trying to drop a table containing several hundred thousand column-based records. Normally when creating the database I use a column-based engine (infinidb) but in this case I forgot to include the ENGINE statement. So the database is pretty much unusable for my needs. Now I have a database full of tables that are taking forever to drop (it's been two hours and nothing has happened). I tried the ALTER TABLE table ENGINE=INFINIDB command but again, it's taking forever (see above re: two hours). EDIT: The first command I tried was DROP TABLE. It hung with every single table. Then I tried the ALTER command in case that was faster for some reason, but it wasn't.

Is there another way to get rid of this database? Eg manually going into the /mysql/ directory and deleting the database? I guess I could just rename it and leave it, but I'd rather get rid of it entirely so it's not taking up space.

Answer 1

First of all you said Can't drop table . But in post you mentioned ALTER TABLE table ENGINE=INFINIDB .

But DROP != ALTER it is two different things.

So you can do following:

• CREATE new table with same structure but engine you need.
• copy( UPDATE ) data from old table to the one you just created.
• DROP old table.
• RENAME rename new one to old name

Answer 2

It turned out that another process (a website) was using this database and had a couple of queries that got 'stuck' in the SQL server and caused the table to hang due to the database using the wrong engine, which I'm assuming was InnoDB since I didn't specify an engine when I initially used the "CREATE TABLE table1 AS SELECT * FROM table2" command. We finally managed to wipe the database and start over. Thanks for your help.