MySQL Bugs: #4328: mysqldump should put newlines between insert records

Bug #4328	mysqldump should put newlines between insert records
Submitted:	29 Jun 2004 18:13	Modified:	29 Jun 2004 18:40
Reporter:	Matt Carter	Email Updates:
Status:	Not a Bug	Impact on me:	None
Category:	MySQL Server: mysqldump Command-line Client	Severity:	S3 (Non-critical)
Version:	mysqldump Ver 10.7 Distrib 4.1.2-alpha	OS:	Windows (Windows 2000)
Assigned to:	Dean Ellis	CPU Architecture:	Any

Description:
4.1.2a appears to have changed the format of the mysqldump export file slightly.  Now, records to be inserted into a single table are all run together on a single line.  This makes it difficult to view the data and difficult to view changes using a standard line-oriented difference viewer like "diff".

I believe the purpose of making mysqldump's output text, as opposed to raw data, is to make the file human-readable.  Putting all the data for a table onto a single line seems to go against that goal.

How to repeat:
Create a table with multiple records.
From the command line, run "mysqldump", specifying the database and table name.  Capture stdout to a file.
Note that the "INSERT INTO" statement in that file has all of its records (in the "VALUES" clause) on a single very long line.

Suggested fix:
Add a newline at the beginning of each record to be inserted.  (The SQL parser for the "INSERT INTO" statement has no problem parsing a SQL statement containing newlines.)

4.1 enables the --opt option by default, which enables --extended-insert, which is what you are seeing.  You can get the old behavior with --skip-extended-insert or --skip-opt.

The request here is different. I want to use extended inserts for performance reasons, but I also want to be able to read the result of mysqldump myself (and have a readable diff of .sql files in the source control system).

Would a patch for this be accepted? Some command line option like --extended-inserts-multiline or similar?

should just add to this change this:

row_length= 2 + extended_row.length;

adding 1 more for *nix platforms. May need to add 2 more for crlf on windows. And then here:

fputc(',',md_result_file);

becomes:

fputs(",\n", md_result_file);

again, when the option is set.

can we re-open this as a feature request?

Started an enhancement request: http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=65465