[Toolserver-l] Backing up a user database

[River Tarnell]

In article <AANLkTin7wxBCmGRiTvpo16A8jZgyD_s8+mA5qw-9ZX1V at mail.gmail.com>,
Carl (CBM) <cbm.wikipedia at gmail.com> wrote:
>I realized I have to make some character set changes on one of my user
>databases, and I want to make a backup before I start. 

>I was planning to use mysqldump for this. Is there a better option
>that I'm overlooking?

Unlikely.

>Is there any reason that the output of 'mysqldump -hSERVER DATABASE'
>with no additional options would have problems restoring on the
>toolserver databases?

The only reason I've seen for this to fail is if you manually increase 
the limit on the size of MEMORY tables, then dump and reimport the 
tables; if the default limit is smaller, the import will fail.

I believe the maximum size of a MEMORY table is now the same as the 
default limit (to stop people using up massive amounts of memory), so 
this probably won't be an issue.

>Are there any subtle options that need to be set on mysqldump to make
>sure the output is usable in that environment?

In previous versions of MySQL it was necessary to use 'mysqldump 
--default-character-set=latin1' if you had tables marked as Latin-1 
which actually contained UTF-8 data.  Otherwise, the dump would be 
corrupted and unusable.

I think this has been fixed (since MySQL now has partial Unicode 
support), but it would probably not hurt to use it anyway if you have 
such tables.

	- river.