This is a technical post for those who are receiving the message “The Used Table Type Doesn’t Support FULLTEXT Indexes” in phpMyAdmin.”

I received this message as I was trying to convert a MySQL table from MyISAM to InnoDB in phpMyAdmin. I was converting this MySQL table from MyISAM to InnoDB so that I could create foreign keys in MySQL tables.

Ok, the problem here is that the InnoDB database engine does not support what are known as “FULLTEXT Indexes”.

I did not recall even setting up any FULLTEXT indexes, but then I remembered that one of my tables was created using a script that I had not thoroughly analyzed. It turns out that this script did, in fact, create FULL text indexes when it created the table.

So, here is how to solve the problem when you receive the message “The used table type doesn’t support FULLTEXT indexes.”

Solution to the Problem

To determine if you have any FULLTEXT indexes, click on the SQL tab in phpMyAdmin and run the following query:

SHOW CREATE TABLE tablename

After you run this command, you will see something that looks like the line below if you do have any FULLTEXT indexes:

FULLTEXT KEY key_name (column_list)

Now, you must remove the FULLTEXT index if you want to convert to the INNODB database engine. To do this, run the following command:

ALTER TABLE tablename DROP INDEX key_name;

Finally, if your goal was to covert your engine to the InnoDB database engine, run the following command to do so:

ALTER TABLE tablename ENGINE=InnoDB;

Post Summary: The Used Table Type Doesn’t Support FULLTEXT Indexes

MySQL will report that the “The Used Table Type Doesn’t Support FULLTEXT Indexes” when you are trying to convert a MySQL table from MyISAM to INNODB in phpMyAdmin. In my case, I wanted to perform this conversion because I was implementing foreign keys in MySQL, which MyISAM does not support.

To remedy this, you need to remove the FULL Indexes as described above and then you are able to convert the MySQL table to INNODB and use foreign keys.

Hopefully, those of you out there who have this problem will come upon this post quickly so that you can solve your problem and move on.

Good luck. And as always, if you have any questions, feel free to post them in the comments section below.