When I clone a production database to a development database, I always need to empty the development database first. I could never find an SQL command to completely purge a database, bur, recently, I learned something about MySQL that surprised me: MySQL doesn’t lose the user rights for a database when you drop it. So, purging a MySQL database (without losing any access data meta data about that DB) is as simple as issuing the following statements:

DROP DATABASE my_development_db;
CREATE DATABASE my_development_db;

Happy cloning! 🙂