これは、MacOSX上のMySQL5.5.9以降に発生したバグのようです。
5.5.13(5月31日リリース)で修正済みとしてマークされ、リリースノートに記載されています: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/news-5-5-13.html
または、5.5.10で確認し、以下に再現した回避策がバグレポートに記載されています。
[20 Mar 11:29] Harald Neiss I also received a new MBP and reinstalled MySQL (mysql-5.5.10-osx10.6-x86_64). Finally I came across the same problem as described above. So here is the query result and what I did to solve it. mysql> show variables like 'lower%'; +------------------------+-------+ | Variable_name | Value | +------------------------+-------+ | lower_case_file_system | ON | | lower_case_table_names | 2 | +------------------------+-------+ 2 rows in set (0.00 sec) Dropped database, created the file /etc/my.cnf with the following content: [mysqld] lower_case_table_names=1 Restarted the MySQL daemon and repeated the query: mysql> show variables like 'lower%'; +------------------------+-------+ | Variable_name | Value | +------------------------+-------+ | lower_case_file_system | ON | | lower_case_table_names | 1 | +------------------------+-------+ 2 rows in set (0.00 sec) I recreated the tables and everything works fine.