Starting from v5.1, TiDB Lightning can automatically recognize the schema and tables in the downstream. If you use TiDB Lightning earlier than v5.1, you need to set no-schema = true in the [mydumper] section in tidb-lightning.toml. This makes TiDB Lightning skip the CREATE TABLE invocations and fetch the metadata directly from the target database. TiDB Lightning will exit with error if a table is actually missing.