MySQL How To Duplicate A Table – Fast Tips

Valerio Barbera

Recently I had to deal with some limitations of my database provider that doesn’t support table renaming. So I had to duplicate a table manually.

The database of my SaaS platform is hosted on Planetscale. The company provides a MySQL-compatible serverless database. Thanks to its serverless nature you can get the power of horizontal sharding, non-blocking schema changes, and many more powerful database features without the pain of implementing them. And a great developer experience.

From another perspective you have to deal with some constraint regarding schema changes. These limitations are needed to guarantee consistency in a sharded environment.

They made a lot of progress since I became a customer (almost two years ago), like the support for Foreign Key constraint: https://planetscale.com/docs/concepts/foreign-key-constraints

Rename a table

Inspector is a Laravel application. Using the Laravel migrations I could use the rename function to simply change the name of a table:

Schema::rename('from', 'to');

Planetscale doesn’t support table renaming natively. So I had to find a workaround to accomplish the task.

To be honest renaming a table is a quite rare operation. For me it was because of an overlap of names between “Projects” and “Applications” entities. I had to rename Projects -> Applications.

How to duplicate a table in MySQL

There are two ways to duplicate a table in MySQL.

Duplicate the table structure

You can duplicate only the table structure (columns, keys, indexes, etc) without data, using “CREATE TABLE … LIKE”:

CREATE TABLE applications LIKE projects;

The result is the creation of the applications table with the exact same structure of the original projects table, but WITH NO data.

To import data too you can run a second statement as “INSERT INTO … SELECT”:

INSERT INTO applications SELECT * FROM projects;

Take care running this statement on big tables because it can take a lot of time and server resources.

Duplicate only column definition

The second option is to duplicate only column definitions and import data in one statement using “CREATE TABLE … AS SELECT”:

CREATE TABLE applications AS SELECT * FROM projects;

The new applications table inherits only the basic column definitions from the projects table. It does not duplicate Foreign Key constraints, indexes, and auto_increment definitions.

This option could be usefult when you have the names of indexes and keys related to the table name. Changing the name of the table you have to replace the names of the constraints. You’d better not import them at all and do it all over again.

Resources

Database is always an hot topic for developers at any stage. You can find other technical resources on the blog. Here are the most popular articles on the topic:

New To Inspector? Monitor your application for free

Inspector is a Code Execution Monitoring tool specifically designed for software developers. You don’t need to install anything in the infrastructure, just install the composer package and you are ready to go.

Unlike other complex, all-in-one platforms, Inspector is super easy, and PHP friendly. You can try our Laravel or Symfony package.

If you are looking for effective automation, deep insights, and the ability to forward alerts and notifications into your messaging environment try Inspector for free. Register your account.

Or learn more on the website: https://inspector.dev

Struggling with RAG in PHP? Discover Neuron AI components

Implementing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is often the first “wall” PHP developers hit when moving beyond simple chat scripts. While the concept of “giving an LLM access to your own data” is straightforward, the tasks required to make it work reliably in a PHP environment can be frustrating. You have to manage document parsing, vector embeddings,

February 2, 2026

Enabling Zero-UI Observability

It is getting harder to filter through the noise in our industry right now. New AI tools drop every day, and navigating the hype cycle can be exhausting. But the reality is that our day-to-day job as developers is changing. Most of us have already integrated AI agents (like Claude, Cursor, or Copilot) into our

January 28, 2026

Neuron AI Laravel SDK

For a long time, the conversation around “agentic AI” seemed to happen in a language that wasn’t ours. If you wanted to build autonomous agents, the industry nudge was often to step away from the PHP ecosystem and move toward Python. But for those of us who have built our careers, companies, and products on

January 6, 2026