Question

im trying to delete a foreign key with the following syntax (5.0.45-community-nt):

alter table [table] drop foreign key [fk_name]

but I’m getting the following error:

The table '#sql-5f8_9c' is full – 99543 ms

any ideas?

thanks!

Answer 1

ALTER TABLE often requires creating a copy of the entire table, so you need enough space on your filesystem to store two copies of the data concurrently as it does this table restructure.

It may seem odd that it needs to make a copy of the table since you’re just dropping a constraint. In more recent versions of MySQL, some ALTER TABLE operations have been optimized so they don’t require a table restructure. But you’re using a version of MySQL from July 2007!

See also:

• The table is full

• InnoDB ‘The Table is Full’ error