How to export and import mysql database

[rev.dennis]

How to show mysql databases 

 

Before you export your database, make sure you see it

mysql -u root -p
mysql> show databases;

 

How to Backup and Export MySQL Database

 

To export a MySQL database into a dump file, simply type the following command syntax in the shell. You can use Telnet or SSH to remotely login to the machine if you don’t have access to the physical box.

mysqldump -u username -ppassword database_name > dump.sql

Replace username with a valid MySQL user ID, password with the valid password for the user (IMPORTANT: no space after -p and the password, else mysqldump will prompt you for password yet will treat the password as database name, so the backup will fail) and database_name with the actual name of the database you want to export. Finally, you can put whatever name you like for the output SQL dump file, here been dump.sql.

 

The while data, tables, structures and database of database_name will be backed up into a SQL text file named dump.sql with the above command.

 

How to Restore and Import MySQL Database

 

You can restore from phpMyAdmin, using Import tab. For faster way, upload the dump file to the MySQL server, and use the following command to import the databases back into the MySQL server.

mysql -u username -ppassword database_name < dump.sql

The import and export of MySQL database not only is important to recover the data when disaster strikes, but also provides an easy way to migrate or move to another server, such as when switching web hosting providers. However, do note that one common problem – character set encoding. Newer release of mysqldump uses UTF8 as its default charset if nothing is specified, while older versions (older than 4.1 typically) use Latin1 as default characterset. If you database charset is Latin1 and dump in UTF8 collation, the data may ends up become simply rubbish, garbled, or unreadable (frequently happen with WordPress blog). If this case, use –default-character-set=charset_name option to specify the character set or convert the database to UTF8.