mysql stopping...

It happened that MySQL was the hold up, and because killing the upgrade process seemed like a risky operation – I needed to find a way to move it along.

I wasn’t able to turn up any other posts from the community about this issue – so I decided to take the usual approach: Start killing process with fingers crossed and blog the outcome!

Just so happens I nailed it on the first try:

$ ps aux | grep mysql
<snip />
root      3624  0.0  0.0   5452  1744 pts/7    S+   09:05   0:00 /usr/bin/mysqladmin --defaults-file=/etc/mysql/debian.cnf shutdown

$ sudo kill -9 3624 #your pid would be different...

The upgrader picked up and moved right along at that point. Hurray!

Exporting the MySQL data into a comma delimited (.csv) file

SELECT * INTO OUTFILE '/var/tmp/data.csv' FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' OPTIONALLY ENCLOSED BY '"' LINES TERMINATED BY '\n' FROM tblWhatever;

This will dump your table into a file with each row from the database being on it’s own line, columns separated by commas, and if there are any spaces or funny business going on with the data in a field, the data will be enclosed in double quotes. You can make changes to this if you like by, for instance, substituting ‘,’ with ‘\t’ would result in a tab delmited file.

some things: The reason I put the file into /var/tmp is because you need to put the file in a place that MySQL can write to. Put it wherever you want though. Also, your system may not use /var/tmp but /tmp or who knows what else. If you are using shared hosting, and are working with sensitive data – don’t do anything dumb like export credit card numbers to /tmp and then leave them there ;)

Importing the comma delimited (.csv) file back into MySQL

First thing, you’ll need to clear out your old table (otherwise the keys would collide):

DELETE FROM tblWhatever;

Then you can proceed with the import:

LOAD DATA INFILE '/home/youruser/data.csv' INTO TABLE tblWhatever FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' OPTIONALLY ENCLOSED BY '"' LINES TERMINATED BY '\n';

some things: Naturally the file will need to be readable by MySQL, but it can be anywhere. Older versions of MySQL used ‘LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE’ but MySQL5 uses just ‘LOAD DATA INFILE’ and only accepts local files (a pretty good thing). So yeah you’ll have to scp your file to and fro.