Is there a library / tool to query MySQL data files (MyISAM / InnoDB) without the server? (the SQLite way)

Question

Oftentimes I want to query my MySQL data directly without a server running or without having access to the server (but having read / write rights to the files).

Is there a tool or maybe even a library around to query MySQL data files like it is possible with SQLite? I'm specifically looking for InnoDB and MyISAM support. Performance is not a factor.

I don't have any knowledge about MySQL internals, but I presume it should be possible to do and not too hard to get the specific code out?

Thank you for any suggestions!

Answer 1

I assume you are doing testing/dev work and dont want to run a server. I had to do this a while ago, and the best I came up with is exporting it to SQL and loading that into memory:

mysqldump -u root -pPASSWORD DATABASENAME TABLENAME > table.sql

HSQLDB is an in-memory relational database for java, you could run the queries into that, do the modification you need and then re-export the .sql file. Bit of a roundabout way of doing it...

Answer 2

MySQL offers a client library which is basically a miniature server. It's called libmysqld. It is C/C++ only, though. According to the docs, it exports an identical API to the normal C/C++ client library.

MySQL Embedded client library