Limiting the number of records from mysqldump?

Question

I am trying to load a small sample of records from a large database into a test database.

How do you tell mysqldump to only give you n records out of 8 million?

Answer 1

mysqldump can be given a SQL query to execute, from which it will take the data for the dump. You can then use the "limit X" clause in your query to restrict the number of rows.