WOW, I remember your last question !!!

If you kept the s_relations_old on the slave, just switch back and start replication.

STOP SLAVE;
ALTER TABLE s_relations RENAME s_relations_bad;
ALTER TABLE s_relations_old RENAME s_relations;
START SLAVE;

You should perform the conversion of the temp_col on the master so that you let that ALTER TABLE replicate to the slave.

You will have to bite the bullet on this one and have some downtime.

RECOMMENDATION #1

Let's presume you have a fair amount of disk space on your cloud server. You create the InnoDB table in stages to watch the effect of diskspace and RAM in slow motion.

Let's say your MyISAM table is called mydb.mytable and you want to convert it to InnoDB.

Try the following:

CREATE TABLE mydb.mytable_new LIKE mydb.mytable;
ALTER TABLE mydb.mytable_new ENGINE=InnoDB;
INSERT INTO mydb.mytable_new SELECT * FROM mydb.mytable;
ALTER TABLE mydb.mytable RENAME mydb.mytable_old;
ALTER TABLE mydb.mytable_new RENAME mydb.mytable;

Play with the table.

If you like its performance, then

DROP TABLE mydb.mytable_old;

If you do not like its performance, then

TRUNCATE TABLE mydb.mytable_old;
INSERT INTO mydb.mytable_old SELECT * FROM mydb.mytable;
ALTER TABLE mydb.mytable RENAME mydb.mytable_zap;
ALTER TABLE mydb.mytable_old RENAME mydb.mytable;
DROP TABLE mydb.mytable_zap;

RECOMMENDATION #2

You mentioned you are running MySQL 5.1. Unless you install the InnoDB Plugin, InnoDB is single threaded. To get InnoDB to be multithreaded:

• Install MySQL 5.6
• Install MySQL 5.1's InnoDB Plugin if you want to keep MySQL 5.1 (Applicable to MySQL 5.1.38+)

Once you do either one, please configure InnoDB to engage multiple cores. See my past posts:

• May 26, 2011 : About single threaded versus multithreaded databases performance
• Sep 12, 2011 : Possible to make MySQL use more than one core?
• Sep 20, 2011 : Multi cores and MySQL Performance