How to search and replace all instances of a string within a database?

Question

Hey everyone,

I have a string that is contained inside of a wordpress install (the name of a server) thousands of times, across multiple columns, records and tables.

I'd like to update it with the location of another server - we are moving the content over.

So the source would be something like http://my-server1/some/link/to/something, and I'd want to replace it with http://my-other-server/some/link/to/something. I'm essentially looking to repeat this process for every instance of http://my-server1.

Is there an easy way to do this in MySQL? A tool? Or do I sadly have to update every record problematically?

Thank you,

Answer 1

A crude (but effective) way of doing it would be to dump the schema into a file, carefully apply the search-and-replace and then re-import.

As a matter of fact I did that today :)

Answer 2

There is also a Wordpress plugin called Search Regex at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search-regex/ which allows running grep search and replace across the database.