Exporting Structure and Data (Backup) - Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 for Effective MySQL Management - page 119

The options available in the Data section are:

• : Generates the following export for the author table:

INSERT INTO 'author' ('id', `name`, `phone`)
VALUES (1, 'John Smith', '+01 445 789-1234');
INSERT INTO 'author' ('id', `name`, `phone`)
VALUES (2, 'Maria Sunshine', '+01 455 444-5683');

Complete inserts

Notice that every column name is present in every statement. The resulting
file is bigger, but will prove more portable on various SQL systems with the
added benefit of being better documented.
Extended inserts • : Packs the whole table data into a single INSERT statement:

INSERT INTO 'author' VALUES (1, 'John Smith',
'+01 445 789-1234'), (2, 'Maria Sunshine', '+01 455 444-
5683');

This method of inserting data is faster than using multiple INSERT
statements, but is less convenient because it makes reading the resultant file
harder. Extended inserts also produces a smaller file, but each line of this file
is not executable in itself because each line does not have an INSERT state-
ment. If you cannot import the complete file in one operation, you cannot
split the file with a text editor and import it chunk by chunk.
Maximal length of created query • : The single INSERT statement generated

for Extended inserts might become too big and could cause problems. Hence,
we set a limit to the number of characters for the length of this statement.
Use delayed inserts • : Adds the DELAYED modifier to INSERT statements. This

accelerates the INSERT operation because it is queued to the server, which
will execute it when the table is not in use. Please note that this is a MySQL
non-standard extension, and it's available only for MyISAM, ISAM, MEMORY ,
and ARCHIVE tables.
Use ignore inserts • : Normally, at import time, we cannot insert duplicate

values for unique keys, as this would abort the insert operation. This option
adds the IGNORE modifier to INSERT and UPDATE statements, thus skipping
the rows that generate duplicate key errors.
Use hexadecimal for BLOB

• : This option makes phpMyAdmin encode

the contents of BLOB fields in 0x format. Such a format is useful because,
depending on the software that will be used to manipulate the export file (for
example a text editor or mail program), handling a file containing 8-bit data
can be problematic. However, using this option will produce an export of the
BLOB that can be twice the size, or even more.