I had same issue. It was related to table's column Collation and Character Set. Make sure Character Set and Collation must be same for both columns on two tables. If you want to set a foreign key on that. Example- If you put foreign key on userID column of userImage table referencing userID column of users table.Then Collation must be same that is utf8_general_ci and Character set utf8 for both columns of tables. Generally when you create a table mysql takes these two configuration from server settings.