Cloning big databases - streamlining the process?
 

I'm copying the latest incarnation of my database onto my test platform so that I can run a test upgrade to the newest vB. The mysql import of the data has been running for almost 2 hours and it's still working on the post table. (ugh!)

Is there a better/easier way to go about this? I'd LOVE to just drop all the posts and copy everything else over, since I really don't need a copy of 1 million posts on my test platform. And if I hose this DB (which I very well might, since I'll be fiddling around) doing it all over again would really not make my day.

For something like that, I'll usually turn off the primary database long enough to rsync the database binaries to the new location. It is much faster. Once a copy of the binaries have been made, you can overwrite the test DB over and over, as needed, and do so very quickly. If you are doing a DB dump, don't include the searchindex/postindex table and the attachments table, if you are storing attachments in the database. You probably won't need this info for an upgrade attempt. When I was still storing attachments in the DB, these two tables alone accounted for about 61% of my total DB size. Eric

I do everything from command line, so when I dump my DB it's something like mysqldump (mydb) > dump.sql. Is there a way to skip the postindex/searchindex tables via command line? Or are you doing it with phpMyAdmin?

[high]* Guest210212002 is intrigued
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I'm not moving servers, just making a clone of my current site on the same box under a private subdomain so that I can run the 3.7 installer on it and see what breaks. :)

Hello. You can use: '--ignore-table=name' to ignore a table in a DB dump. If you want to ignore multiple tables, you would use the directive multiple times. Run 'man mysqldump' or 'mysqldump --help' for more information. Eric

Sorry, the syntax is actually: ' --ignore-table=database.name '. I forgot to put the DB name in there. I was just backing up my database and realized I had forgotten that. Eric