MySQL import database but ignore specific table

The accepted answer by RandomSeed could take a long time! Importing the table (just to drop it later) could be very wasteful depending on size.

For a file created using

mysqldump -u user -ppasswd --opt --routines DBname > DBdump.sql

I currently get a file about 7GB, 6GB of which is data for a log table that I don't 'need' to be there; reloading this file takes a couple of hours. If I need to reload (for development purposes, or if ever required for a live recovery) I skim the file thus:

sed '/INSERT INTO `TABLE_TO_SKIP`/d' DBdump.sql > reduced.sql

And reload with:

mysql -u user -ppasswd DBname < reduced.sql

This gives me a complete database, with the "unwanted" table created but empty. If you really don't want the tables at all, simply drop the empty tables after the load finishes.

For multiple tables you could do something like this:

sed '/INSERT INTO `TABLE1_TO_SKIP`/d' DBdump.sql | \
sed '/INSERT INTO `TABLE2_TO_SKIP`/d' | \
sed '/INSERT INTO `TABLE3_TO_SKIP`/d' > reduced.sql

There IS a 'gotcha' - watch out for procedures in your dump that might contain "INSERT INTO TABLE_TO_SKIP".

mysqlimport is not the right tool for importing SQL statements. This tool is meant to import formatted text files such as CSV. What you want to do is feed your sql dump directly to the mysql client with a command like this one:

bash > mysql -D your_database < your_sql_dump.sql

Neither mysql nor mysqlimport provide the feature you need. Your best chance would be importing the whole dump, then dropping the tables you do not want.

If you have access to the server where the dump comes from, then you could create a new dump with mysqldump --ignore-table=database.table_you_dont_want1 --ignore-table=database.table_you_dont_want2 ....

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Check out this answer for a workaround to skip importing some table

For anyone working with .sql.gz files; I found the following solution to be very useful. Our database was 25GB+ and I had to remove the log tables.

gzip -cd "./mydb.sql.gz" | sed -r '/INSERT INTO `(log_table_1|log_table_2|log_table_3|log_table_4)`/d' | gzip > "./mydb2.sql.gz"

Thanks to the answer of Don and comment of Xosofox and this related post: Use zcat and sed or awk to edit compressed .gz text file