When creating a new SessionFactory with hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto=create on an empty database, Hibernate attempts to drop foreign keys on tables that do not exist yet.

The culprit appears to be SchemaManagementToolCoordinator calling SchemaDropper.doDrop() without checking if the schema actually exists first: https://github.com/hibernate/hibernate-orm/blob/0a2a709f9eb9954fd1a570c0779d0f510d8c045b/hibernate-core/src/main/java/org/hibernate/tool/schema/spi/SchemaManagementToolCoordinator.java#L137

This ends up trying to drop the foreign keys at https://github.com/hibernate/hibernate-orm/blob/17de173cb5334d866f1886d3e057f49a6c987bad/hibernate-core/src/main/java/org/hibernate/tool/schema/internal/SchemaDropperImpl.java#L240 and results in an exception like

com.mysql.jdbc.exceptions.jdbc4.MySQLSyntaxErrorException: Table 'test.table1' doesn't exist