Last week one of my collagues came to me with the following problem. He was not able to create an innodb table. MySQL returned ERROR 1005: Can’t create table (errno: -1). Most of the times this problem is a foreign key related issue but now this wasn’t the case (Foreign key error will return errno: 150). What actually happened is that ibdata already contains the registration of the new table but the frm file wasn’t there. This way when he wanted to create the table the server responded with error. Although he wasn’t able to remove the table either. It was caused the file-by-file cloning of the database.

For better understanding you have to be familiar with the inner operations of MySQL. With the most simplistic explaination I could say that MySQL is just working on a high SQL abstraction level which can use different storage engine for storing datas. Viewing from this aspect MySQL doesn’t care how the files …