How to compress a mysqldump backup using Gzip

What is mysqldump?

mysqldump is a tool that allows you to perform logical backups for your MySQL databases. The output of mysqldump is a SQL file that can be used later to restore one or more databases.

How to compress a mysqldump backup using Gzip?

Gzip can be used together with mysqldump in order to compress the size of the output. It has 9 levels of compression, 6 being the default one.

Let’s assume we have a database named my_app for which we want to create a dump and compress it using gzip (default level of compression). We can achieve it with the following command:

mysqldump my_app | gzip > my_app_backup.sql.gz

How to specify the compression level?

Let’s assume we want to backup the same my_app database, but this time with a compression level of 8. We can do it with the following command:

mysqldump my_app | gzip -8 > my_app_backup.sql.gz

What else can be done using mysqldump?

mysqldump has a lot of flags & functions. Check out mysqldump.guru to find out what else you can do with mysqldump.