Roy Britten wrote:
The backup files should be plain text, try taking a look at them. It
could be extra whitespace, depending on how the backup program formats
it's output.
Depending on the method used the database dump may have one line per
insert statement, or a more compact format with multiple inserts per
(very long) line.
Nick quite rightly points out that a quick visual scan (or diff file1
file2 | less) will show you the difference.
Roy.
thanks for the replies. viewing in a text editor shows 3 main general
differences. firstly mysqldump creates "drop table if exists"
statements then "create table", whereas phpmyadmin does "create table if
not exists". mysqldump includes "lock table" and "unlock table",
phpmyadmin does not appear to.
phpmyadmin uses new lines where mysqldump tends to treat sections on one
line.
however the noticeable difference seems to be that phpmyadmin often (but
not always) exports the data in long hex strings, but mysqldump is
almost totally human readable.
the latter 2 points seem to provide a good enough explanation of the
different file sizes.
Cheers,
Roger
