Comments on: Drop all tables from a MySQL Database without deletion

By: pavel

pavel — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 13:27:36 +0000

worked like a charm,
elegant solution,
thanks man!

By: Prasinos

Prasinos — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 22:42:41 +0000

Eddie, the “more efficient” bit was tongue-in-cheek
Still, I think that using only mysql is conceptually better: we want the table names so we just execute “show tables”. We don’t need the “create table” statements of mysqldump so why get them and then grep them out?

In any case, the difference is not really important.
I was just toying with mysql/mysqldump to find out more about their potential and your post gave me a nice motivation.

By: Eddie

Eddie — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 22:52:27 +0000

@Prasinos Thanks for the feedback though I'm not sure I understand why you say that is more efficient.. Still one line, and I think that sed would be more resource intensive than grep.

mysqldump -uuser -ppass --no-data --add-drop-table database | grep ^DROP | mysql  -uuser -ppass database

Vs.

mysql -uuser -ppass -e “show tables” –skip-column-names database | sed -e “s/.*/DROP TABLE IF EXISTS \`&\`;/” | mysql -uuser -ppass database

I will leave the choice up to our readers, more options is not a bad thing.

By: Prasinos

Prasinos — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 14:29:54 +0000

I think we can be a little more efficient than that. We can just ask mysql to give us the table names and use sed to add the “DROP TABLE IF EXISTS” at the front:

mysql -uuser -ppass -e “show tables” –skip-column-names database | sed -e “s/.*/DROP TABLE IF EXISTS \`&\`;/” | mysql -uuser -ppass database

(all in one line)
We can also use xargs instead of sed.
(You may want to have a look at my post for more info)