Exporting table from Amazon RDS into a csv file

Presumably you are trying to export from an Amazon RDS database via a SELECT ... INTO OUTFILE query, which yields this indeed commonly encountered issue, see e.g. export database to CSV. The respective AWS team response confirms your assumption of lacking server access preventing an export like so, and suggests an alternative approach as well via exporting your data in CSV format by selecting the data in the mysql command line client and piping the output to reformat the data as CSV, like so:

mysql -u username -p --database=dbname --host=rdshostname --port=rdsport --batch 
  -e "select * from yourtable" 
  | sed 's/\t/","/g;s/^/"/;s/$/"/;s/\n//g' > yourlocalfilename

User fpalero provides an alternative and supposedly simpler approach, if you know and specify the fields upfront:

mysql -uroot -ppassword --database=dbtest 
  -e "select concat(field1,',',field2,',',field3) FROM tabletest" > tabletest.csv

Good luck!

First of all, Steffen's answer works in most cases, I up-voted it and I have myself used it for several years.

I recently encountered some larger and more complex outputs where "sed" was not enough and decided to come up with a simple utility to do exactly that.

I build a module called sql2csv that can parse the output of the MySQL CLI:

$ mysql my_db -e "SELECT * FROM some_mysql_table" 

+----+----------+-------------+---------------------+
| id | some_int | some_str    | some_date           |
+----+----------+-------------+---------------------+
|  1 |       12 | hello world | 2018-12-01 12:23:12 |
|  2 |       15 | hello       | 2018-12-05 12:18:12 |
|  3 |       18 | world       | 2018-12-08 12:17:12 |
+----+----------+-------------+---------------------+

$ mysql my_db -e "SELECT * FROM some_mysql_table" | sql2csv

id,some_int,some_str,some_date
1,12,hello world,2018-12-01 12:23:12
2,15,hello,2018-12-05 12:18:12
3,18,world,2018-12-08 12:17:12

You can also use the built in CLI:

sql2csv -u root -p "secret" -d my_db --query "SELECT * FROM some_mysql_table;"

1,12,hello world,2018-12-01 12:23:12
2,15,hello,2018-12-05 12:18:12
3,18,world,2018-12-08 12:17:12

More info https://github.com/gabfl/sql2csv