The ‘mysqldump’ command is used to dump databases managed by MySQL. Let’s consider three the most useful cases of MySQL database dumping.

1. The simplest case is the whole database dumping:

mysqldump -u username -ppassword database_name  > the_whole_database_dump.sqlCode language: CSS (css)

2. Sometimes, there’s a need to dump a single table from your database. You can do it in the next way:

mysqldump -u username -ppassword database_name table_name > single_table_dump.sqlCode language: CSS (css)

You can also specify several tables separated by whitespace to dump these tables only.

3. If you want to dump only rows that meet a specific criteria, you can add ‘where’ option to your mysqldump command. For example, dump only rows where date_created is today:

mysqldump -u username -ppassword database_name table_name --where="date_created='2013-06-25'" > few_rows_dump.sqlCode language: JavaScript (javascript)