Back up a table with a GEOMETRY column using mysqldump?

Question

I recently created a MySQL table with a column of type GEOMETRY.

When I back up the table with mysqldump, it outputs my geometry column as a quoted string, containin

Answer 1

In my case, this error appeared specifically with empty geometry values in a non-null geometry column.

In my case, the empty geometries were legitimate cases of unknown geometry, so I addressed this by changing the column to allow null values, and then running UPDATE ... SET geom = NULL WHERE IsEmpty(geom);

After this, I was able to re-run mysqldump and successfully import the resulting sql into a separate database.

(To be honest, I'm not sure how the empty geometry values got there in the first place - I don't even know the syntax to create an empty geometry value)