Restoring select databases/tables from an --all-databases backup

[Raffi]

I use the --all-databases switch to backup my entire database.
Sometimes there's a need to restore individual databases or tables form
the backup file. What command should I use for this?

Thanks,
Raffi

[Bill Turczyn]

Taken from: Linux Server Hacks
By Rob Flickenger

Here is a method for restoring a single mysql table from a huge
mysqldump

Like a good admin, you faithfully dump your mysql tables every night,
and save them to the filesystem in compressed form (presumably to be
picked up by a backup script later). You probably have something like
this running in cron on your database server (or one of its replicated
slaves):

for x in `mysql -Bse show databases`; do
mysqldump $x | gzip -9 > /var/spool/mysqldump/$x.`date +%Y%m%d`.gz
done
This will cover you if anything catastrophic happens to your live
database. But if your database grows to an appreciable size, doing
partial restores can be difficult. On a database with several million
rows, your dumps suddenly become massive piles of data that need to be
sifted through. How can you easily restore a single table out of a
several hundred megabyte compressed dump?

Here's a simple method using Perl. Create a script called
extract-table, with this in it:

#!/usr/bin/perl -wn
BEGIN { $table = shift @ARGV }
print if /^create table $table\b/io .. /^create table (?!$table)\b/io;
To extract the User table from the dump of a database called randomdb,
try something like this:

# zcat /var/spool/mysqldump/randomdb.200209 01.gz | extract-table Users

~/

Users.dump
Now you can restore your Users table with a simple:

# mysql randomdb -e "drop table Users"
# mysql randomdb < ~/Users.dump

[Raffi]

Bill Turczyn wrote:

Taken from: Linux Server Hacks
By Rob Flickenger

Here is a method for restoring a single mysql table from a huge
mysqldump

Like a good admin, you faithfully dump your mysql tables every night,
and save them to the filesystem in compressed form (presumably to be
picked up by a backup script later). You probably have something like
this running in cron on your database server (or one of its replicated slaves):

for x in `mysql -Bse show databases`; do
mysqldump $x | gzip -9 > /var/spool/mysqldump/$x.`date +%Y%m%d`.gz
done
This will cover you if anything catastrophic happens to your live
database. But if your database grows to an appreciable size, doing
partial restores can be difficult. On a database with several million
rows, your dumps suddenly become massive piles of data that need to be sifted through. How can you easily restore a single table out of a
several hundred megabyte compressed dump?

Here's a simple method using Perl. Create a script called
extract-table, with this in it:

#!/usr/bin/perl -wn
BEGIN { $table = shift @ARGV }
print if /^create table $table\b/io .. /^create table (?!$table)\b/io;

To extract the User table from the dump of a database called randomdb, try something like this:

# zcat /var/spool/mysqldump/randomdb.200209 01.gz | extract-table

Users

~/

Users.dump
Now you can restore your Users table with a simple:

# mysql randomdb -e "drop table Users"
# mysql randomdb < ~/Users.dump

That's exactly what is happening and many times only specific
tables/databases get corrupted and it's inefficient to restore the
complete database structure. I'll try the script out as soon as I get a
chance. I guess mysql doesn't have a built in feature that resores
individual tables and databases from a full backup and leaves
everything else alone.

Raffi