Symptoms

You will receive a notification that the /tmp partition is full.

Description

When you run certain ALTER or CREATE commands on an InnoDB table, a temporary table is created in MySQL's tmpdir during the operation. The default value in my.cnf is /tmp.

When you are loading the data, /tmp is being filled with files like this:

#sql_****.MAD
#sql_****.MAI

In the MySQL error log, the following entries will be found:

[Warning] mysqld: Disk is full writing '/tmp/#sql_*****.MAD' (Errcode: 28 "No space left on device"). Waiting for someone to free space... (Expect up to 60 secs delay for server to continue after freeing disk space)

[ERROR] mysqld: Disk full (/tmp/#sql_*****.MAI); waiting for someone to free some space... (errno: 28 "No space left on device")

Workaround

I would suggest you change the value of tmpdir in my.cnf to be on a disk with more space.

You can find more details on how to do that in the following article:

How-To move the MySQL tmpdir.