Mysqldump only tables with certain prefix / Mysqldump wildcards?

Question

I have this huge, messy database I am cleaning up. It houses 500+ tables, which is the result of combining Magento Enterprise with Joomla in one single DB.

To make t

Answer 1

Building on some of the other nice answers here, I created shell script to make this even easier. This script generates 3 files in the output - one with the structure for all tables, one with the data for all non-excluded tables, and one with the data for all "excluded" tables (you could comment this out if you really don't need it). Then you can use which one(s) you need.

#!/bin/bash

echo -n "DB Password: "
read -s PASSWORD

HOST=yourhostname.com
USER=youruser
DATABASE=yourdatabase

MAIN_TABLES=$(mysql -h $HOST -u $USER -p$PASSWORD -D $DATABASE -Bse "SHOW TABLES WHERE Tables_in_dashboard NOT LIKE 'bigtable_%';")
STATS_TABLES=$(mysql -h $HOST -u $USER -p$PASSWORD -D $DATABASE -Bse "SHOW TABLES LIKE 'bigtable_%';")

echo "Dumping structure..."
mysqldump -h $HOST -u $USER -p$PASSWORD $DATABASE --no-data | gzip > structure.sql.gz

echo "Dumping main data..."
mysqldump -h $HOST -u $USER -p$PASSWORD $DATABASE --no-create-info $MAIN_TABLES | gzip > data.sql.gz

echo "Dumping big table data..."
mysqldump -h $HOST -u $USER -p$PASSWORD $DATABASE --no-create-info $STATS_TABLES | gzip > big_table_data.sql.gz