While working with RDS and Google Cloud SQL I have come to realize that excluding the mysql schema from a mysqldump is important. However with many databases, the –all-databases option enables you only to select all or none. There is however an easy solution to exclude one or more databases in mysqldump with this little gem I created.
$ time mysqldump --databases `mysql --skip-column-names -e "SELECT GROUP_CONCAT(schema_name SEPARATOR ' ') FROM information_schema.schemata WHERE schema_name NOT IN ('mysql','performance_schema','information_schema');" >` >/mysql/backup/rds2.sql
An you can exclude as many schemas as you want.
I checked the mysqldump –help, there was no option in MySQL 5.1, asked a colleague just to be sure I wasn’t wasting my time, and it took all of 2 minutes to create and test a working solution.