Sams Teach Yourself MySQL in 21 Days, Second Edition

Importing Data

MySQL offers a variety of ways of getting data into a database. You've just seen how to use SQL statements to do this. This section looks at how you can import and process data in bulk.

Batch Import Using mysql

Recall from Day 6 that you can import data by using the mysql client program in batch mode.

You can write the syntax in two ways. One is like this:

mysql [options] databasename < filename
						

The same is possible by changing the order of things on the command line and using the Unix cat program and a | (bar, or pipe) to pipe an entire file to mysql for processing:

cat filename | /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql [options] databasename
						

Provided that your PATH Unix environment variable contains the path to mysql, this shorter form ...