Limiting the number of records from mysqldump?

Question

I am trying to load a small sample of records from a large database into a test database.

How do you tell mysqldump to only give you n records out of 8 million?

Thanks

Answer 1

mysqldump can be given a SQL query to execute, from which it will take the data for the dump. You can then use the "limit X" clause in your query to restrict the number of rows.

Answer 2

As skaffman says, use the --where option:

mysqldump --opt --where="1 limit 1000000" database

Of course, that would give you the first million rows from every table.