Stuck in a django south migration - TransactionManagement error

I just ran into a similar issue.

• MySQL 5.6.13 (on Amazon RDS)
• Django==1.5.4
• MySQL-python==1.2.4
• South==0.8.2

I went through almost every possible fix here and through countless Google searches with zero luck.

I looked at the database schema and a table I had not created named 'ROLLBACK_TEST' was part of the schema.

Once I dropped that mystery table the migration ran flawlessly.

This table could only have originated via Django, South or possibly an internal process at Amazon as nothing else has access.

I had the same problem with Django 1.6 and South 1.0 on a MySQL instance. After turning on the django.db.backends logger I realised the migration was stuck on the following SQL statement:

DEBUG (0.003) CREATE TABLE ROLLBACK_TEST (X INT); args=None

So I checked the database and sure enough found the ROLLBACK_TEST table. Deleting it resolved the problem:

$ manage.py dbshell
mysql> DROP TABLE ROLLBACK_TEST;

I had the same problem and was banging my head for a while. It turns out my (MySQL) database user didn't have sufficient privileges. I assigned: ALTER, CREATE, DELETE, DROP, INDEX, INSERT, SELECT, UPDATE to the user and everything worked fine.