MySQL DROP all tables, ignoring foreign keys

Question

Is there a nice easy way to drop all tables from a MySQL database, ignoring any foreign key constraints that may be in there?

Answer 1

This is a pretty old post, but none of the answers here really answered the question in my opinion, so I hope my post will help people!

I found this solution on another question that works really well for me:

mysql -Nse 'show tables' DB_NAME | while read table; do mysql -e "SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0; truncate table \`$table\`" DB_NAME; done

That will actually empty all your tables in the database DB_NAME, and not only display the TRUNCATE command line.

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

If in linux (or any other system that support piping, echo and grep) you can do it with one line:

echo "SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS = 0;" > temp.txt; \
mysqldump -u[USER] -p[PASSWORD] --add-drop-table --no-data [DATABASE] | grep ^DROP >> temp.txt; \
echo "SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS = 1;" >> temp.txt; \
mysql -u[USER] -p[PASSWORD] [DATABASE] < temp.txt;

I know this is an old question, but I think this method is fast and simple.

Answer 3

One-step solution without copying returned value from SQL Select query using procedure.

SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS = 0

SET @TABLES = NULL;
SELECT GROUP_CONCAT('`', table_schema, '`.`', table_name,'`') INTO @TABLES FROM information_schema.tables 
  WHERE table_schema = 'databaseName';

SET @TABLES = CONCAT('DROP TABLE IF EXISTS ', @TABLES);

PREPARE stmt FROM @TABLES;
EXECUTE stmt;
DEALLOCATE PREPARE stmt;

SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS = 1

Answer 4

A one liner to drop all tables from a given database:

echo "DATABASE_NAME"| xargs -I{} sh -c "mysql -Nse 'show tables' {}| xargs -I[] mysql -e 'SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0; drop table []' {}"

Running this will drop all tables from database DATABASE_NAME.

And a nice thing about this is that the database name is only written explicitly once.

Answer 5

Drop all the tables from database with a single line from command line:

mysqldump -u [user_name] -p[password] -h [host_name] --add-drop-table --no-data [database_name] | grep ^DROP | mysql -u [user_name] -p[password] -h [host_name] [database_name]

Where [user_name], [password], [host_name] and [database_name] have to be replaced with a real data (user, password, host name, database name).

Answer 6

You can do:

select concat('drop table if exists ', table_name, ' cascade;')
  from information_schema.tables;

Then run the generated queries. They will drop every single table on the current database.

Here is some help on drop table command.