The Case of the Mysterious Disappearing Test Database

The Problem

I work on a Rails 3.2.2 application that's in the process of being upgraded out of the stone age. We're running a MySQL database and, up until this past week, everything's worked exactly as expected. That is, until the mystery began...

A few days ago, I went to go run my local test suite (Test::Unit) and saw an error that suggested my test database no longer existed. So I logged into MySQL and saw that, in fact, it didn't. Gone! Poof!

No error messages, no warnings. Nothing. Just gone.

I recreated the database and didn't give much thought to it. I figured that - somehow - I'd deleted it by accident.

Two days later, the exact same thing happened to my coworker. Test database vanished without warning.

And today, it happened to another developer on my team.

I can't find anything about this anywhere. No SO posts, no blog articles, nada.

Has anybody else experienced this? Does anyone have any idea of what could be causing it, or of what steps we could take to investigate?

Many thanks.

The Stack

• Rails 3.2.22.2 (using the mysql2 adapter gem)
• mysql 14.14 Distrib 5.6.26, for osx10.10 (x86_64) using EditLine wrapper