Have you ever found yourself in the situation that you had to migrate a database to another server, or that you had to set up a developing environment for a programmer ?

Well mysqldump is your friend - In one line you can make a backup of the contents, tables, basically eveything you need to “rebuild” your database.

The syntax is as follows:

mysqldump -u USERNAME -p DATABASENAME > DATABASENAME_FOR_BACKUP.sql

This will save the database in the directory where MYSQLDUMP program is residing, it ought to be possible to enter a path in the name.

This is normally done from within the CLI shell of the server.

Loads of other very handy MySQL tips can be found at the following url: http://www.pantz.org/tags/mysql.html who by the way have loads and loads of other useful resources and tips for other technologies available as well.