Importing and Exporting Data

Abstract

Back in the Stone Age, cavemen never really had any issues with data incompatibility, as stones and one’s own memory were the only storage medium. Copying data involved pulling out the old chisel and getting busy on a new slab of granite. Now, of course, the situation is much different. Hundreds of data storage strategies exist, the most commonplace of which include spreadsheets and various types of databases. Working in a complex, often convoluted fashion, you often need to convert data from one storage type to another, say between a spreadsheet and a relational database, or between an Oracle database and MySQL. If this is done poorly, you could spend hours, and even days and weeks, massaging the converted data into a usable format. This chapter seeks to eliminate that conundrum, by introducing MySQL’s data import and export utilities, as well as various techniques and concepts central to lessening the pain involved in performing such tasks.