A MySQL foreign keys drop table, re-create table example

Summary: How to drop MySQL database tables and recreate them when you have foreign keyrelationships between the tables.

This is pretty obscure, but I thought I'd post it here so I wouldn't forget how to do this ... if you ever have a situation when using MySQL where:

You're just starting to use a database table
The table joins to other tables
The table doesn't have any data in it (or possibly doesn't have much data in it)
You want to change the MySQL table schema
You may be able to use this technique

In my case I have a MySQL database table named 'entities' that looked fine when I was designing the table, but as I began using it, I realized there were a few things I wanted to change. I may have been able to make these changes using the MySQL ALTER TABLE syntax -- I don't know, I didn't have to look it up -- but instead I was able to use a MySQL foreign keys drop table trick/tecnique I wrote about long ago.

In short, to make the changes to my MySQL database table named entities, I issued these commands to drop and then re-create the database table, even though it had foreign keys to other database tables, and other tables had foreign keys to it:

# tell mysql to ignore foreign keys for a little while
SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS = 0;

# drop my old database table
drop table if exists entities;

# re-create my table
create table entities (
  id int unsigned auto_increment not null primary key,
  project_id int unsigned not null,
  name varchar(64) not null,
  type character(3),
  num_rets int,
  num_dets int,
  complexity varchar(7),
  foreign key (project_id) references projects (id) on delete cascade
) ENGINE = InnoDB;

# turn the mysql foreign keys check back on
SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS = 1;

As mentioned, this is a bit of an obscure technique, combining this MySQL foreign keys check with the need to drop a database table and then re-create the table, while the table had very little data in it, but hey, if it helps anyone else, I'm happy with it.