Exporting a very large MySQL table to a .CSV using a SELECT statement?

Question

I've got a MySQL table with ~1B rows. I need to export a single column from every row into a CSV.

1. I've tried the following but the query uses all the memory on the local machine where I'm exporting the query and the mysql process gets killed.

   mysql -uuser -ppass -h host.com --database=dbname -e "select column_name FROM table_name" > column_name_export.csv

2. I can't use a SELECT INTO OUTFILE because the MySQL instance is running in Amazon RDS and I don't have access to the server.

Is there a MySQL utility to export this in batches, or do I need to write a script to select over ranges of ids?

Answer 1

One way to do it is using Server-side cursors .

But in my case even the server ran out of memory (for very large tables), so I opted for splitting the file into multiple batches, ordered by any id.