I’m sure anyone that has experience in moving websites or even updating them have run into problems where phpadmin has timed out and the more you try to reupload the file the more it decides that it won’t cooperate with you the more frustrating it gets.

This happened to me recently and in my search for an alternative I found a program that solves the problem. The title of the program is eloquently called “BigDump”.

“Dump being the term used to because The mysqldump client is a backup program originally written by Igor Romanenko. It can be used to dump a database or a collection of databases for backup or transfer to another SQL server (not necessarily a MySQL server). The dump typically contains SQL statements to create the table, populate it, or both. However,mysqldump can also be used to generate files in CSV, other delimited text, or XML format.”

What bigdump will do is load your database for you at intervals which stops the timeout error. here’s how it works. It staggers import of large and very large MySQL Dumps even through the web servers with hard runtime limit and those in safe mode.

The script imports only a small part of the huge dump and restarts itself. The next session starts where the last was stopped. Simple in practice and simple to install.

Firstly download the file here Click here http://www.ozerov.de/bigdump.zip

Then extract the file
Then on your local machine create a folder called “bigdump” and open the folder and place the bigdump.php file inside of the folder with the database you want to install on your server.

Open the bigdump.php and edit the
// Database configuration
$db_server = ‘localhost’; $db_name = ‘DATABASE_NAME’; $db_username = ‘USER_NAME’; $db_password = ‘***PASSWORD***’;

And

// OPTIONAL SETTINGS $filename = ‘YOUR_SQL_FILE_NAME’;
// Specify the dump filename to suppress the file selection dialog

You can then upload the file to your server via an FTP program like Filezilla

Next to run the program

Once uploaded navigate to www.yourdomain.com/bigdump/bigdump.php

And click the start button

And that’s it your large database is installed. I know that’s not a very large upload but it’s just an example to show and I have tried to work it

N.B. Delete the .sql file from the server as it is a major security risk

Full credit for this great program goes to

Author: Alexey Ozerov (alexey at ozerov dot de)
// AJAX & CSV functionalities: Krzysiek Herod (kr81uni at wp dot pl)
// Copyright: GPL (C) 2003-2013
// More Infos: http://www.ozerov.de/bigdump