Question

I’m moving a large wordpress mysql db (1.49gb) from an old server to a new one, what I did was to:

mysqldump -u root -p dbname > public_location/db.sql

then I did a:

wget http://oldserver/db.sql

I created the database on the new server, created the user, then:

mysqldump -u root -p dbname < db.sql

It says dump completed, but why is the database on the new server still empty? I don’t see any tables at all.

Answer 1

Rather than call mysqldump on the new server with the input file, just call mysql

mysql -u root -p dbname < db.sql

You can, if you are brave and the second VPS has port 3306 open to the old one via TCP and you have a user account root@oldserver able to do the write, do this in one action:

# Pipe the dump directly from the old vps to the new vps:
mysqldump -uroot -p dbname | mysql -h newserver -uroot -p dbname

I wouldn’t attempt it over the Internet, but I’ve done it on a LAN several times.

Finally, don’t forget the --routines parameter if you have stored functions and procedures that need to migrate with the database. They won’t go into the dump without it.

mysqldump --routines -u root -p dbname > public_location/db.sql