Question

How can I do this? Can it be done with cron jobs? If so, where can I read up on how to do this?

I need to dump the data from my database into a CSV file every so many hours. I want the CSV file to be saved into a folder on the server. Is this even possible with MySQL? I’d appreciate any help on this.

Answer 1

PHP isn’t necessary. You can schedule a query to run periodically via a cron job and output to CSV using code like the following:

SELECT col1, col2, col3 FROM table WHERE whatever='whatever' INTO OUTFILE 'reports/result.csv'
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' OPTIONALLY ENCLOSED BY '"'
ESCAPED BY ‘\\’
LINES TERMINATED BY '\n'

With the above query stored in a file, the cron command would look like

mysql -u username -p password < filewiththequery.sql

If you need to dump the whole database in a way that can be re-imported to the database, use mysqldump instead.