Is there a MySql binary dump format? Or anything better than plain text INSERT statement?

Question

Is there anything better (faster or smaller) than pages of plain text CREATE TABLE and INSERT statements for dumping MySql databases? It seems awfully inefficient for large amounts of data.

I realise that the underlying database files can be copied, but I assume they will only work in the same version of MySql that they come from.

Is there a tool I don't know about, or a reason for this lack?

Answer 1

Not sure if this is what you're after, but I usually pipe the output of mysqldump directly to gzip or bzip2 (etc). It tends to be a considerably faster than dumping to stdout or something like that, and the output files are much smaller thanks to the compression.

mysqldump --all-databases (other options) | gzip > mysql_dump-2010-09-23.sql.gz

It's also possible to dump to XML with the --xml option if you're looking for "portability" at the expense of consuming (much) more disk space than the gzipped SQL...

Answer 2

It's worth noting that MySQL has a special syntax for doing bulk inserts. From the manual:

INSERT INTO tbl_name (a,b,c) VALUES(1,2,3),(4,5,6),(7,8,9);

Would insert 3 rows in a single operation. So loading this way isn't as inefficient as it might otherwise be with one statement per row, and instead of 129 bytes in 3 INSERT statements, this is 59 bytes, and that advantage only gets bigger the more rows you have.