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

Best solution for me so far

Select Database -> Right Click -> Tasks -> Generate Scripts - will open wizard for generating scripts. After choosing objects in set Scripting option click Advanced Button. Under "Script DROP and CREATE" select Script DROP.

Run script.

Answer 2

In php its as easy as:

$pdo = new PDO('mysql:dbname=YOURDB', 'root', 'root');

$pdo->exec('SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS = 0');

$query = "SELECT concat('DROP TABLE IF EXISTS ', table_name, ';')
          FROM information_schema.tables
          WHERE table_schema = 'YOURDB'";

foreach($pdo->query($query) as $row) {
    $pdo->exec($row[0]);
}

$pdo->exec('SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS = 1');

Just remember to change YOURDB to the name of your database, and obviously the user/pass.

Answer 3

In a Linux shell like bash/zsh:

DATABASE_TO_EMPTY="your_db_name";
{ echo "SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS = 0;" ; \
  mysql "$DATABASE_TO_EMPTY" --skip-column-names -e \
  "SELECT concat('DROP TABLE IF EXISTS ', table_name, ';') \
   FROM information_schema.tables WHERE table_schema = '$DATABASE_TO_EMPTY';";\
  } | mysql "$DATABASE_TO_EMPTY"

This will generate the commands, then immediately pipe them to a 2nd client instance which will delete the tables.

The clever bit is of course copied from other answers here - I just wanted a copy-and-pasteable one-liner (ish) to actually do the job the OP wanted.

Note of course you'll have to put your credentials in (twice) in these mysql commands, too, unless you have a very low security setup. (or you could alias your mysql command to include your creds.)