Today I’ve run into a bit of an issue with one of the MySQL databases from one of the sites that I manage. I’m used to going about my merry way with phpMyAdmin and it’s trusty (?) export table feature but that is no longer an option with this Database.

It’s a Wordpress Mu (Multi-user) site that has well over 5,000 MySQL Database tables in it. PhpMyAdmin just could not handle an export of that size and timed out on me over and over again.

It’s time for some command line action!

So I loged into my server via SSH and entered in the mysqldump command only to be greeted by

mysqldump: Got error: 1016: Can't open file: './databasename/table.frm' (errno: 24) when using LOCK TABLES

Great!

So after some searching I found that this is a bug in MySQL and to get around it and dump (not Drop!) a large database I needed to use the following in my mysqldump command : –lock-tables=false.

So my final MySQL command looked like this

# mysqldump --add-drop-table -h 127.0.0.1 -u MyUsername -pMyPassword MyDatabase --lock-tables=false | gzip > backup.bak.sql.gz

I hope this helps someone else.

If there is a problem with the way I’m going about this please let me know of a better solution!