Backing up a MySQL database to a .txt file using a PHP script
 

I'm looking for some way to back up a huge MySQL database to a downloadable .txt file. I have found some PHP scripts like this one: http://www.zend.com/codex.php?id=634&single=1 but that doesn't seem to do anything.

Can anyone (cd34 or so :D ) can help me out here please?
Thanx!

if it is huge, you're likely to run into timeouts on apache that aren't going to allow it to be downloaded completely.

What you can try is something like forking a process that does

mysqldump -q -u username -ppassword databasename > /tmp/dump.sql

and writing the pid of the forked process so that you can check to see if the process is still running. With most apache servers, in 2-3 minutes a php script (or any cgi script) will time out and kill the process -- resulting in an incomplete dump.

Alternatively you can write your own dump that will go through the records one by one and output a . or space to the screen to keep apache from timing out.

Thanx, I'll give that a try :)

Oh and does there has to be a space between -p password?

it needs to be -ppassword or -p'password' if there are characters that the shell might escape.

I would generally recommend using mysqlhotcopy, mainly because its faster than mysqldump, although it uses locks.
But since you need a PHP script to do the work you probably don't have access to the server?!

Check it out http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mysqldump.html