On Mon, 2003-10-27 at 22:01, Dathan Vance Pattishall wrote:

So the conclusion is: unfortunately, the symlink support in MySQL was not designed for "synonyming", as far as DDL (Data Definition Language - CREATE TABLE / DROP TABLE / ALTER TABLE) commands are concerned. It was designed with the thought that symlinks are to be used to point to a *different* directory (another partition where there is more room, or another device to balance disk load). For DDL commands MySQL always expects a table to exist only once, i.e. to have only one name. Putting, in the database directory, a symlink and the real table means giving 2 names to one table...

I will add a note about this into our manual soon. I understand this is is an inconvenience for you; you will be safe if you always do the DDL commands (ALTER TABLE, in your case) on the real table. It's ok to do DML commands (INSERT/DELETE/UPDATE/LOADDATA, which fortunately occur much more often than ALTER TABLE normally) on both tables indifferently.