CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpsqlbackup
Gary Willoughby
Gary Willoughby

Reputation: 52498

How do i backup a SQL database using PHP?

How do i backup a SQL database using PHP.

Is there a vendor agnostic way to do this that conforms to ANSI SQL?

If not maybe you can list how to do it for each of the database vendors?

Upvotes: 10

Views: 4332

Answers (4)

staticsan
staticsan

Reputation: 30555

Whilst backing up a database "conformant to ANSI SQL" is possible and admirable, you will still encounter portability issues. The most obvious is that whilst MySQL's dump/restore format is fairly fast, it achieves this principally by using a non-standard extension to SQL. So you can't just hand the dump to PostGresql: it won't work. In fact, PostGresql is also quite slow at handling a huge amount of INSERT statements. It's native dump format uses it's own custom SQL statement optimized for inserting a large amount of data at once.

Upvotes: 0

vog
vog

Reputation: 25597

Every database system comes with some program for dumping its contents.

You can simply call that program from PHP using system() or shell_exec().

For example, if you use PostgreSQL with enabled Ident authentication and want to dump the Database test directly as SQL text to the browser, it's as simple as: 

<?php
header('Content-type: text/plain');
system('pg_dump test');
?>

When using MySQL with database user and password stored into ~/.my.cnf, it is also very simple: 

<?php
header('Content-type: text/plain');
system('mysqldump test');
?>

However, don't do this: 

<?php
header('Content-type: text/plain');
system('mysqldump -utestuser -ptestpassword test');
?>
because transmitting a password as command line argument is very insecure.

Upvotes: 6

moo
moo

Reputation: 7779

It's a pretty complicated process. I recommend you use phpmyadmin or similar.

Upvotes: 0

kevtrout
kevtrout

Reputation: 4984

I love phpmybackuppro

Upvotes: 1

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