Mysqldump only tables with certain prefix / Mysqldump wildcards?

Question

I have this huge, messy database I am cleaning up. It houses 500+ tables, which is the result of combining Magento Enterprise with Joomla in one single DB.

To make t

Answer 1

Another oneliner to extract list of tables' name with mysql -sN … and then use each item in a "for … in … " shell loop to drop them:

for f in `mysql dbname -sN -e "SHOW TABLES LIKE 'bak\_%' "` ; do mysql dbname -rsN -e "DROP TABLE $f"; done

or (expanded version)

for f in `mysql dbname -sN -e "SELECT TABLE_NAME FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES WHERE TABLE_SCHEMA = 'dbname' AND TABLE_NAME LIKE 'bak\_%' "` ; do mysql dbname -rsN -e "DROP TABLE $f"; done

Or use "group_concat" to concatenate* names of tables, if they are short enough:

tables=`mysql dbname -srN -e "SELECT GROUP_CONCAT(TABLE_NAME SEPARATOR ',') FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES WHERE TABLE_SCHEMA = 'dbname'  AND TABLE_NAME LIKE 'bak\_%' "`; mysql dbname -rsN -e "DROP TABLE $tables"

*some limits like the value of "group_concat_max_len" (typically equals to 1024, cf your 70 tables) may interfere.

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Same principle, but for dumping all tables except the ones starting with "bak_":

for f in `mysql dbname -sN -e "SELECT TABLE_NAME FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES WHERE TABLE_SCHEMA = 'dbname' AND NOT(TABLE_NAME LIKE 'bak\_%') "` ; do mysqldump -u [u] -p dbname "$f" >> dump_dbname.sql; done

Answer 2

There are already a lot of good answers, but I came here with such variation:

mysql MY_DATABASE -N -u MY_MYSQLUSER -p -e 'show tables like "%MY_LIKE_CODE%";' |
xargs mysqldump MY_DATABASE -u MY_MYSQLUSER -p |
gzip > ~/backup/`date +%Y%m%d:::%H:%M:%S-MY_DAMP.sql.gz`

By this action I made a table dump by the mask like %mask% from the database to a single file. Hopefully someone will find it useful.

Answer 3

You can specify table names on the command line one after the other, but without wildcards. mysqldump databasename table1 table2 table3

You can also use --ignore-table if that would be shorter.

Another idea is to get the tables into a file with something like

mysql -N information_schema -e "select table_name from tables where table_schema = 'databasename' and table_name like 'bak_%'" > tables.txt 

Edit the file and get all the databases onto one line. Then do

mysqldump dbname `cat tables.txt` > dump_file.sql

To drop tables in one line (not recommended) you can do the following

mysql -NB  information_schema -e "select table_name from tables where table_name like 'bak_%'" | xargs -I"{}" mysql dbname -e "DROP TABLE {}"