[cd34]

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.