Creating and importing a dump file
A dump file, or simply a dump, is a text file containing the SQL queries that are necessary to recreate a database or all the databases in a MariaDB instance.
Dump files can be created with a tool called mysqldump, a tool distributed along with MariaDB. This program will be discussed in the next subsection. A dump can later be imported into MariaDB by passing it to the mysql command-line client. We have already discussed this technique in Chapter 1, Installing MariaDB, and we will not repeat it here. However, the restoring of dump files is covered in the final examples.
Dumps generated with mysqldump make use of executable comments for any MariaDB or MySQL-specific features. These executable comments include the version numbers for all the features introduced since the MySQL 4.1 version, which went into production in 2004. This makes it possible to load dumps into any version of MariaDB and MySQL, not necessarily a recent one. Loading them into other DBMSs...
