Is this safe? Is this OK to do in MYSQL?

Question

I have always done this:

mysqldump -hlocalhost -uuser -ppass MYDATABASE > /home/f/db_backup/MYDATABASE.sql
mysql -uuser -ppass MYDATABASE < MYDATABASE.sql

But, if I do this instead...is this safe? Is this identical to the above???

mysqldump -hlocalhost -uuser -ppass MYDATABASE | gzip > /home/f/db_backup/MYDATABASE.sql.gz
zcat MYDATABASE.sql.gz | mysql -uuser -ppass MYDATABASE

Answer 1

That's totally fine (and more efficient, of course!) Mysql doesn't see any difference; both methods end up passing uncompressed SQL data.

Answer 2

It's safe (mostly) and if you had spare CPU cycles you could add '-C' to your mysqldump to have it compress client <-> server comms which should save you some time on large DBs.
FWIW per db username/password details in ~/.my.cnf of the user who is running the mysqldump command. This way the DB credentials won't be viewable by other users on the system using command like 'ps'.