Some times you need to copy only table structures across databases. This article describes two ways of doing it. If the whole database schema need to be exported, mysqldump is very effective. A --nodata flag will dump all tables' schema. Like this. mysqldump --nodata -p -u username databaseName But if you want to copy a specific table, individually, you could use "create table like" feature. You could create it even from a different database. However it must be on the same mysqld instance. Like this. create table newtable like oldtable; --Or from a table in other database create table mytable like otherdatabase.tablename;