Can I restore a single table from a full mysql mys

Question

I have a mysqldump backup of my mysql database consisting of all of our tables which is about 440 megs. I want to restore the contents of just one of the tables form the mysqldump. Is this possible? Theoretically, I could just cut out the section that rebuilds the table I want but I don't even know how to effectively edit a text document that size.

Answer 1

Most modern text editors should be able to handle a text file that size, if your system is up to it.

Anyway, I had to do that once very quickly and i didnt have time to find any tools. I set up a new MySQL instance, imported the whole backup and then spit out just the table I wanted.

Then I imported that table into the main database.

It was tedious but rather easy. Good luck.

Answer 2

1. Backup

   $ mysqldump -A | gzip > mysqldump-A.gz
   

2. Restore single table

   $ mysql -e "truncate TABLE_NAME" DB_NAME
   $ zgrep ^"INSERT INTO \`TABLE_NAME" mysqldump-A.gz | mysql DB_NAME
   

Answer 3

I used a modified version of uloBasEI's sed command. It includes the preceding DROP command, and reads until mysql is done dumping data to your table (UNLOCK). Worked for me (re)importing wp_users to a bunch of Wordpress sites.

sed -n -e '/DROP TABLE.*`mytable`/,/UNLOCK TABLES/p' mydump.sql > tabledump.sql

Answer 4

One possible way to deal with this is to restore to a temporary database, and dump just that table from the temporary database. Then use the new script.

Answer 5

Back in '08 I had a need to do this too. I wrote a Perl script that'll do it, and it's now my method of choice. Also summarized how to do it in awk or how to restore elsewhere and extract. Recently I added this sed method to the list as well. You can find the script and the other methods here: http://blog.tsheets.com/2008/tips-tricks/extract-a-single-table-from-a-mysqldump-file.html

Answer 6

The 'sed' solutions mentioned earlier are nice but as mentioned not 100% secure

• You may have INSERT commands with data containing: ... CREATE TABLE...(whatever)...mytable...

• or even the exact string "CREATE TABLE `mytable`;" if you are storing DML commands for instance!

(and if the table is huge you don't want to check that manually)

I would verify the exact syntax of the dump version used, and have a more restrictive pattern search:

Avoid ".*" and use "^" to ensure we start at the begining of the line. And I'd prefer to grab the initial 'DROP'

All in all, this works better for me:

sed -n -e '/^DROP TABLE IF EXISTS \`mytable\`;/,/^UNLOCK TABLES;/p' mysql.dump > mytable.dump