title: Rails Unit Testing with MyISAM Tables
body: <p>I've got an application that requires the use of MyISAM on a few tables, but the rest are the traditional InnoDB type. The application itself is not concerned with transactions where it applies to these records, but performance is a concern.</p>
  
  <p>The Rails testing environment assumes the engine used is transactional, though, so when the test database is generated from the schema.rb it is imported with the same engine. Is it possible to over-ride this behaviour in a simple manner?</p>
  
  <p>I've resorted to an awful hack to ensure the tables are the correct type by appending this to test_helper.rb:</p>
  
  <pre><code>(ActiveRecord::Base.connection.select_values("SHOW TABLES") - %w[ schema_info ]).each do |table_name|
    ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute("ALTER TABLE `#{table_name}` ENGINE=InnoDB")
  end
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Is there a better way to make a MyISAM-backed model be testable?</p>