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A few days ago I showed a quick way to extract one table form a mysqldump output. Here is a more complete version which supports extracting either a full schema or a table from the specified schema. If full schema is being extracted, the script also looks for any associated views and routines.

Using mysqldump is a quick way to do backups, although usually limited to only smaller databases - perhaps up to a few gigabytes large. It is still a fairly popular solution as majority of databases aren't even that big. Also phpMyAdmin provides a variant of mysqldump format through its Export function. Everything works well for plain dump and restore, but in certain situations it is necessary to restore only a single table. With all data being in a single text file, it may not be a trivial task. Here is how I deal with the problem.

As with any open source software, anyone can download MySQL sources, build binaries for some platforms and distribute their own packages. So we have the official ones from Oracle, MariaDB, and Percona - the makers of MySQL and its forks respectively. There are also those distributed with operating systems or that are available for install from their standard repositories. Some people or groups also create packages out of the most recent versions of various software and make them available to the world. Finally, some mash up a vanilla MySQL with various patches creating even more options. What to choose?

Have you ever spent a lot of time thinking about how to install and configure a Linux server for MySQL database? I will try to highlight all the critical steps and some of the decisions you may need to make.

I must admint I was greatly impressed by the Oracle activity on MySQL yesterday. I cannot say I didn't see it was coming, but most certainly the magnitude of what happened, the flood of announcements, was a bit overwhelming. Looking at the list of improvements, I started wondering what can it actually mean to the MySQL ecosystem.