How to easily dump Magento database with n98-magerun

It looks I felt in love with a n98-magerun tool. I already talked about my favourite n98-magerun commands and about a command which allows to generate fake customer data. Today I’m going to continue n98-magerun post series and focus on a command which allows to make database dump very easily. n98-magerun.phar db:dump in addition to commands mentioned in previous blog posts is another one must have.

The command allows to dump a database very easily. Similar to a n98magerun mysql-client command, it doesn’t require me to enter a password and look for any connection details. It automatically generates a dump file name based on a current date and time, allows to use built-in filters to exclude big utility tables and finally creates an archive after completing the dump.

Sample calls may look as follows:

n98-magerun.phar db:dump
n98-magerun.phar db:dump --strip "@stripped @ee_changelog @idx"
n98-magerun.phar db:dump --strip "@stripped @ee_changelog @idx" --compression=gz

First call produced a 5.1 GB file containing all database tables. Second stripped a bunch of database tables such as changelog tables, index tables, reports or logs tables and it resulted in reducing the database dump to 3.1 GB. Third one called with a compression option reduced size to about 251 MB. Third gain is expected and it could be also achieved with one additional gz command call, but it’s really convenient to do a gzipped dump in one command call.

Stripping not needed database tables can save gigabytes of transfer when working with a big database. However, it won’t fit all use cases, for example in which you need to prepare a dump to debug index problems where you need to get an exact state of a Magento application database.