Restoring a MySQL dump with binary blobs

Question

I am moving a MySQL database from a now inaccessible server to a new one. The dump contains tables which in turn contain binary blobs, which seems to cause trouble with the MySQL command line client. When trying to restore the database, I get the following error:

ERROR at line 694: Unknown command '\''.

I inspected the line at which the error is occurring and found that it is a huge insert statement (approx. 900k characters in length) which seems to insert binary blobs into a table.

Now, I have found these two questions that seem to be connected to mine. However, both answers proved to not solve my issue. Adding --default-character-set=utf8 or even --default-caracter-set=latin1 didn't change anything and creating a dump with --hex-dump is not possible because the source database server is no longer accessible.

Is there any way how I can restore this backup via the MySQL command line client? If yes, what do I need to do?

Please let me know if you need any additional information.

Thanks in advance.

EDIT: I am using MySQL 5.6.35. Also, in addition to the attempts outlined above, I have already tried increasing the max_allowed_packet system variable to its maximum value - on both server and client - but to no avail.

Answer 1

If I remember correctly, you need to set the max_allowed_packet in your my.cnf to a large enough value to accommodate the largest data blob in your dump file, and restart the MySQL server.

Then, you can use a restore command like this one :

mysql --max_allowed_packet=64M  < your_dumpfile.sql

More info here : [ https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/server-system-variables.html#sysvar_max_allowed_packet]

Answer 2

No solution, just confirming that I had seen the same behavior with a "text" field type that contains a long JSON string. The SQL (backup) file that MySQLdump generates has an INSERT statement and it truncates the length of that particular text field to "about" 64K (there are many escaped quotes/double-quotes and various UTF-8 characters) - without issuing a warning that such truncation had occurred.

Naturally the restore into a JSON column fails because of the premature termination of the JSON formatted string.

What was odd in this case, that the column in the backed-up table was defined as TEXT, which indeed should have been limited to 64 KB. On a hunch, I changed the schema for the backed up table to MEDIUMTEXT. After THAT MySQLdump no longer truncated that string in the INSERT statement somewhere beyond 64K.

It appears as if MySQLdump doesn't just output the entire column, but truncates to whatever it thinks the maximum string length should be based on schema information, and does NOT issue warnings when it does truncate.