I'm designing an internal web application that uses MySQL as its backend database. The integrity of the data is crucial, so I am using the innoDB engine for its foreign key constraint features.

I want to do a full-text search of one type of records, and that is not supported natively with innoDB tables. I'm not willing to move to MyISAM tables due to their lack of foreign key support and due to the fact that their locking is per table, not per row.

Would it be bad practice to create a mirrored table of the records I need to search using the MyISAM engine and use that for the full-text search? This way I'm just searching a copy of the data and if anything happens to that data it's not as big of a deal because it can always be re-created.

Or is this an awkward way of doing this that should be avoided?

Thanks.