johndunning on "Unknown table 'SESSION_VARIABLES' in information_schema"

I have used eclipse to build a war to deploy in a tomcat server using quercus.

Running on my local machine (macbook pro) wordpress is fine.

When I deploy the war and start tomcat, wodpress starts fine and I can do the initial setup - but I get an error message displayed at the top of each page as follows

/home/jd/apache-tomcat-7.0.41/webapps/wordpress/wp-includes/wp-db.php:650: Warning: com.mysql.jdbc.exceptions.jdbc4.MySQLSyntaxErrorException: Unknown table 'SESSION_VARIABLES' in information_schema

Can anybody please explain what is causing this and why it is fine on my local machine but not remote.

thanks