I want a mysqldump –ignore-database option

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.

Tagged with: Databases MySQL

Related Posts

My take on PyCon Australia 2026

PyCon AU 2026 held in Brisbane this week was a five day event for the Python community. With specialized tracks and dedicated tutorial and engineering days there was a wide variety of content available.

Read more

Fixing Old Software Bugs Without Thinking

I previously came across an issue in my benchmarking work where I relied on the Latency Histogram section of sysbench output. On Linux it worked fine — I generally ran my workload there, so it never mattered.

Read more

Curating DuckDB Datasets Leveraging AI

In Curated MySQL Data Sets for Realistic Testing I described datasets assembled the manual way — download, schema, load, validate, document — over hours or days per source. This post is the follow-up I promised: what changes when AI assists the same workflow, using DuckDB as the target engine and GeoNames as the first example.

Read more