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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-18T11:31:39+00:00

I need to copy a large (80 mil records) MySQL table into another table

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I need to copy a large (80 mil records) MySQL table into another table as I need to add an index to the table and using ALTER would just be too slow / run out of RAM.

I’ve tried running a MySQL script containing INSERT INTO table2 SELECT * FROM table1 in a screen instance so that I can detach and exit the SSH session, but for some reason it did the first 20 million rows (which took a couple of hours) and then it randomly stopped. Would this method require a lot of memory? How else can I do this fast and in the background?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Dump the table into a .csv file

    mysqldump -u [username] -p -t -T/path/to/directory/file.txt [database] [table]  --fields-terminated-by=,

    Create a new table with the proper schema

    Then load the new table with the .csv data in it

    LOAD DATA INFILE '/path/to/directory/file.txt' INTO TABLE database.new_table FIELDS TERMINATED BY ','

    FYI: these commands aren’t tested and may need some adjusting, but you should get the idea

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