How to duplicate a MySQL database on the same server

Question

I have a large MySQL database, lets call it live_db, which I want to replicate on the same machine to provide a test system to play around with (test_db), including table structure and data. In regular intervals I want to update the test_db with the content of the live_db; if possible incremental.

Is there some built-in mechanism in MySQL to do that? I think that master-slave replication is not the thing I want since it should be possible to alter data in the test_db. These changes do not have to be preserved, though.

Regards,

CGD

Answer 1

The mysql command line client will accept a stream of SQL statements from standard input. You can therefore pipe the output of mysqldump directly into mysql on the command line. Doing this as a cron job will regularly overwrite your test data with updated live data:

mysql --user=username --password=passwd -e 'DROP DATABASE test_db;'
mysql --user=username --password=passwd -e 'CREATE DATABASE test_db;'
mysqldump --user=username --password=passwd live_db | mysql --user=username --password=passwd test_db

Note that since your data is large, it will take a long time.