Extracting a Table from a MySQL Dump Occasionally, I need to use the data in a single table from a full MySQL database backup dump. Ordinarily, you’d just import the database dump into MySQL and go. Unfortunately, if the dump file is several Gigabytes (even when compressed), it becomes time-consuming to SCP this file around and then load it into MySQL. In order to speed up the process, I extract the table I need from the full database dump. Then, I can take that table, SCP it to where I need it, load it into MySQL, and perform necessary operations with it. Fortunately, complicated programs and commands are not necessary for this: only grep and sed are needed. The first step is to determine the table structure from the decompressed MySQL database dump: BASH $ grep -n "Table structure" [ MySQL_dump_filename ] .sql Example: Let’s say we want to extract the phpbb_config table from a giant MySQL phpBB ...