Copy/duplicate database without using mysqldump

I can see you said you didn't want to use mysqldump, but I reached this page while looking for a similar solution and others might find it as well. With that in mind, here is a simple way to duplicate a database from the command line of a windows server:

1. Create the target database using MySQLAdmin or your preferred method. In this example, db2 is the target database, where the source database db1 will be copied.
2. Execute the following statement on a command line:

mysqldump -h [server] -u [user] -p[password] db1 | mysql -h [server] -u [user] -p[password] db2

Note: There is NO space between -p and [password]

You can duplicate a table without data by running:

CREATE TABLE x LIKE y;

(See the MySQL CREATE TABLE Docs)

You could write a script that takes the output from SHOW TABLES from one database and copies the schema to another. You should be able to reference schema+table names like:

CREATE TABLE x LIKE other_db.y;

As far as the data goes, you can also do it in MySQL, but it's not necessarily fast. After you've created the references, you can run the following to copy the data:

INSERT INTO x SELECT * FROM other_db.y;

If you're using MyISAM, you're better off to copy the table files; it'll be much faster. You should be able to do the same if you're using INNODB with per table table spaces.

If you do end up doing an INSERT INTO SELECT, be sure to temporarily turn off indexes with ALTER TABLE x DISABLE KEYS!

EDIT Maatkit also has some scripts that may be helpful for syncing data. It may not be faster, but you could probably run their syncing scripts on live data without much locking.

If you are using Linux, you can use this bash script: (it perhaps needs some additional code cleaning but it works ... and it's much faster then mysqldump|mysql)

#!/bin/bash

DBUSER=user
DBPASSWORD=pwd
DBSNAME=sourceDb
DBNAME=destinationDb
DBSERVER=db.example.com

fCreateTable=""
fInsertData=""
echo "Copying database ... (may take a while ...)"
DBCONN="-h ${DBSERVER} -u ${DBUSER} --password=${DBPASSWORD}"
echo "DROP DATABASE IF EXISTS ${DBNAME}" | mysql ${DBCONN}
echo "CREATE DATABASE ${DBNAME}" | mysql ${DBCONN}
for TABLE in `echo "SHOW TABLES" | mysql $DBCONN $DBSNAME | tail -n +2`; do
        createTable=`echo "SHOW CREATE TABLE ${TABLE}"|mysql -B -r $DBCONN $DBSNAME|tail -n +2|cut -f 2-`
        fCreateTable="${fCreateTable} ; ${createTable}"
        insertData="INSERT INTO ${DBNAME}.${TABLE} SELECT * FROM ${DBSNAME}.${TABLE}"
        fInsertData="${fInsertData} ; ${insertData}"
done;
echo "$fCreateTable ; $fInsertData" | mysql $DBCONN $DBNAME