The problem of installing the South in an existing database. MySql does not support "schema-changing instructions"

Question

I have a django project with existing db that I really would like to avoid reset or interrupt. I am trying to set South, but when I run my initial python manage.py migrate example migration, I get the following error:

 Running migrations for example: - Migrating forwards to 0001_initial. > example:0001_initial ! Error found during real run of migration! Aborting. ! Since you have a database that does not support running ! schema-altering statements in transactions, we have had ! to leave it in an interim state between migrations. ! You *might* be able to recover with: = DROP TABLE `example_page` CASCADE; [] = DROP TABLE `example_likebydate` CASCADE; [] = DROP TABLE `example_followbydate` CASCADE; [] ! The South developers regret this has happened, and would ! like to gently persuade you to consider a slightly ! easier-to-deal-with DBMS. ! NOTE: The error which caused the migration to fail is further up. Traceback (most recent call last): ... File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/MySQLdb/connections.py", line 36, in defaulterrorhandler raise errorclass, errorvalue _mysql_exceptions.OperationalError: (1050, "Table 'example_page' already exists") 

So, the obvious solution is to run this SQL, but I don’t know what it will do and does not want to run it if it is going to dump the table and lose my data.

What are my options for this South migration to work without data loss?

Answer 1

If your schema has already been updated with models.py, which was used to create 0001_inital.py, you must start the initial migration with -fake to essentially tell sub that you are already in version 0001 of the schema.