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slimdump is a little tool to help you create configurable dumps of large MySQL-databases. It works off one or several configuration files. For every table you specify, it can dump only the schema (CREATE TABLE ... statement), full table data, data without blobs and more.

We createdslimdump because we often need to dump parts of MySQL databases in a convenient and reproducible way. Also, when you need to analyze problems with data from your production databases, you might want to pull only relevant parts of data and hide personal data (user names, for example).

mysqldump is a great tool, probably much more proven when it comes to edge cases and with a lot of switches. But there is no easy way to create a simple configuration file that describes a particular type of dump (e.g. a subset of your tables) and share it with your co-workers. Let alone dumping tables and omitting BLOB type columns.

When PHP is your everyday programming language, you probably haveComposer installed. You can then easily installslimdump as aglobal package. Just runcomposer global require webfactory/slimdump. In order to use it like any other Unix command, make sure$COMPOSER_HOME/vendor/bin is in your$PATH.

Of course, you can also addslimdump as a local (per-project) Composer dependency.

We're also working on providing a.phar package ofslimdump for those not using PHP regularly. With that solution, all you need is to have the PHP interpreter installed and to download a single archive file to useslimdump. You can help us and open a pull request for that :-)!

slimdump needs the DSN for the database to dump and one or more config files:

slimdump {DSN} {config-file} [...more config files...]

slimdump writes to STDOUT. If you want your dump written to a file, just redirect the output:

slimdump {DSN} {config-file} > dump.sql

If you want to use an environment variable for the DSN, replace the first parameter with-:

MYSQL_DSN={DSN} slimdump - {config file(s)}

The DSN has to be in the following format:

mysql://[user[:password]@]host[:port]/dbname

For further explanations have a look at theDoctrine documentation.

This turns off printing some progress information onstderr. Useful in scripting contexts.

Example:slimdump --no-progress {DSN} {config-file}

You can also specify the buffer size, which can be useful on shared environments where yourmax_allowed_packet is low.Do this by using the optional cli-optionbuffer-size. Add a suffix (KB, MB or GB) to the value for better readability.

Example:slimdump --buffer-size=16MB {DSN} {config-file}

If you have tables with a large number of rows to dump and you are not planning to keep your dumps under versioncontrol, you might consider writing eachINSERT INTO-statement to a single line instead of one line per row. You cando this by using the cli-parametersingle-line-insert-statements. This can speed up the import significantly.

Example:slimdump --single-line-insert-statements {DSN} {config-file}

Configuration is stored in XML format somewhere in your filesystem. As a benefit, you could add the configuration to your repository to share a quickstart to your database dump with your coworkers.

Example:

<?xml version="1.0" ?><slimdump><!-- Create a full dump (schema + data) of "some_table"-->  <tablename="some_table"dump="full" /><!-- Dump the "media" table, omit BLOB fields.-->  <tablename="media"dump="noblob" /><!-- Dump the "user" table, hide names and email addresses.-->  <tablename="user"dump="full">      <columnname="username"dump="masked" />      <columnname="email"dump="masked" />      <columnname="password"dump="replace"replacement="test" />  </table><!-- Dump the "document" table but do not pass the "AUTO_INCREMENT" parameter to the SQL query.       Instead start to increment from the beginning-->  <tablename="document"dump="full"keep-auto-increment="false" /><!--    Trigger handling:    By default, CREATE TRIGGER statements will be dumped for all tables, but the "DEFINER=..."    clause will be removed to make it easier to re-import the database e. g. in development    environments.    You can change this by setting 'dump-triggers' to one of:        - 'false' or 'none': Do not dump triggers at all        - 'true' or 'no-definer': Dump trigger creation statement but remove DEFINER=... clause        - 'keep-definer': Keep the DEFINER=... clause-->  <tablename="events"dump="schema"dump-triggers="false" /><!--    View handling:    A configured <table> may also be a database view. A CREATE VIEW statement will be issued    in that case, but the "DEFINER=..." clause will be removed to make it easier to re-import    the database e. g. in development environments.    You can change this by setting 'view-definers' to one of:        - 'no-definer': Dump view creation statement but remove DEFINER=... clause        - 'keep-definer': Keep the DEFINER=... clause    'no-definer' is the default if the 'view-definers'  attribute is omitted.-->  <tablename="aggregated_data_view"dump="schema"view-definers="no-definer" /></slimdump>

You may want to select only some rows. In that case you can define a condition on a table.

<?xml version="1.0" ?><slimdump><!-- Dump all users whose usernames begin with foo-->  <tablename="user"dump="full"condition="`username` LIKE 'foo%'" /></slimdump>

In this example, only users with a username starting with 'foo' are exported:A simple way to export roughly a percentage of the users is this:

<?xml version="1.0" ?><slimdump><!-- Dump every tenth user-->  <tablename="user"dump="full"condition="id % 10 = 0" /></slimdump>

This will export only the users with an id divisible by ten without a remainder, e.g. about 1/10th of the user rows (giventhe ids are evenly distributed).

If you want to keep referential integrity, you might have to configure a more complex condition like this:

<?xml version="1.0" ?><slimdump><!-- Dump all users whose usernames begin with foo-->  <tablename="user"dump="full"condition="id IN (SELECT author_id FROM blog_posts UNION SELECT author_id from comments)" /></slimdump>

In this case, we export only users that are referenced in other tables, e.g. that are authors of blog posts or comments.

The following modes are supported for thedump attribute:

• none - Table is not dumped at all. Makes sense if you use broad wildcards (see below) and then want to exclude a specific table.
• schema - Only the table schema will be dumped
• noblob - Will dump aNULL value for BLOB fields
• full - Whole table will be dumped
• masked - Replaces all chars with "x". Mostly makes sense when applied on the column level, for example for email addresses or user names.
• replace - When applied on a element, it replaces the values in this column with either a static value, or a nice dummy value generated byFaker. Useful e.g. to replace passwords with a static one or to replace personal data like the first and last name with realistically sounding dummy data.

Of course, you can use wildcards for table names (* for multiple characters, ? for a single character).

Example:

<?xml version="1.0" ?><slimdump><!-- Default: dump all tables-->  <tablename="*"dump="full" /><!-- Dump all tables beginning with "a_" as schema-->  <tablename="a_*"dump="schema" /><!-- Dump "big_blob_table" without blobs-->  <tablename="big_blob_table"dump="noblob" /><!-- Do not dump any tables ending with "_test"-->  <tablename="*_test"dump="none" /></slimdump>

This is a valid configuration. If more than one instruction matches a specific table name, the most specific one will be used. E.g. if you have definitions for blog_* and blog_author, the latter will be used for your author table, independent of their sequence order in the config.

You probably don't want to use any personal data from your database. Therefore, slimdump allows you to replace data oncolumn level - a great instrument not only for General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance.

The simplest replacement is a static one:

<?xml version="1.0" ?><slimdump>    <tablename="users"dump="full">        <columnname="password"dump="replace"replacement="test" />    </table></slimdump>

This replaces the password values of all users with "test" (in clear text - but for sure you havesome sort of hashing in place, do you?).

To achieve realistically sounding dummy data, slimdump also allowsbasic Faker formatters.You can use every Faker formatter which needs no arguments and modifiers such asunique (just seperate the modifierwith an object operator (->), as you would do in PHP). This is especially useful if your table has a unique constrainton a column containing personal information, like the email address.

<?xml version="1.0" ?><slimdump>    <tablename="users"dump="full">        <columnname="username"dump="replace"replacement="FAKER_word" />        <columnname="password"dump="replace"replacement="test" />        <columnname="firstname"dump="replace"replacement="FAKER_firstName" />        <columnname="lastname"dump="replace"replacement="FAKER_lastName" />        <columnname="email"dump="replace"replacement="FAKER_unique->safeEmail" />    </table></slimdump>

Currently, only MySQL is supported. Feel free to port it to the database of your needs.

• Make surePhive is installed
• Runphive install to install tools, includingBox
• Runcomposer install --no-dev to make sure thevendor/ folder is up to date
• Runtools/box compile to buildslimdump.phar.

You can execute the phpunit-tests by callingvendor/bin/phpunit.

This tool was written by webfactory GmbH, Bonn, Germany. We're a software development agency with a focus on PHP (mostlySymfony). We're big fans of automation, DevOps, CI and CD, and of open source in general.

If you're a developer looking for new challenges, we'd like to hear from you! Otherwise, if this tool is useful for you, add a ⭐️.

• https://www.webfactory.de
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Copyright 2014-2020 webfactory GmbH, Bonn. Code released underthe MIT license.