“Cannot resolve table name” error when applying MySQL dump to RDS

Question

I'm setting up replication of an external MySQL instance to RDS.

Both the external MySQL instance and RDS run MySQL 5.7.10.

I've followed the procedure, but when dumping the database with mysqldump and sending it to mysql connected to RDS, I get the following error:

ERROR 1215 (HY000) at line 2081: Cannot add foreign key constraint

SHOW ENGINE InnoDB STATUS on RDS shows:

------------------------
LATEST FOREIGN KEY ERROR
------------------------
2016-03-25 01:38:56 0x2ad07ddcf700 Error in foreign key constraint of table db/Prospect:
 FOREIGN KEY (`restaurantId`) REFERENCES `Restaurant` (`id`),
  CONSTRAINT `FK_Prospect_Zone` FOREIGN KEY (`zoneId`) REFERENCES `Zone` (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=18292 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_unicode_ci:
Cannot resolve table name close to:
 (`id`),
  CONSTRAINT `FK_Prospect_Zone` FOREIGN KEY (`zoneId`) REFERENCES `Zone` (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=18292 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_unicode_ci

OK, indeed the dump file recreates the tables alphabetically, so the Prospect table appears before Restaurant and Zone, which can explain the error.

But NO, because mysqldump adds SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0 to the top of the file, so it should work anyway.

So I decided to test it against a vanilla MySQL 5.7 installation, and no surprise, the dump is imported successfully with the exact same commands.

What causes this error specifically on RDS, and how to avoid it?

Answer 1

Just found out that this was a bug that has been fixed in the next release, MySQL 5.7.11.

Extract from the changelog:

InnoDB: Creating a table with a full-text index and a foreign key constraint failed when foreign_key_checks was disabled. (Bug #22094601, Bug #78955)

It took me time to figure out that the full-text index was the source of the problem, I had to trim down my dump file line by line until the dump could be successfully imported.

---

Unfortunately RDS does not support MySQL 5.7.11 yet, so I had to work around this issue. Here is what I did:

• created the dump file with mysqldump as usual
• opened the dump file and commented out all FULLTEXT KEY lines
• noted down these lines in notepad
• imported the dump to the replica as usual
• connected to the replica, and issued ALTER TABLE statements to add each full-text index I had in my notepad back to its table

This worked perfectly well and my tables are fully in sync now.