I have often needed to clone a table without it’s data in MySQL.

Oftentimes this has been because I have a continually growing temporary table and I just need to clear up some disk space. And it’s a lot faster and more guaranteed than trying to delete and optimise the table.

Clone a table structure without it’s data

Let’s say that your table in question is called table1:

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create table table1tmp like table1;
drop table table1;
rename table table1tmp to table1;

If you run the above queries either in quick succession, or altogether in a single statement, you will notice that this is a very fast method even on very big tables.

Another article exists to clone and drop tables over here.