[cookiecaper]

I don't have numbers right now, but we've been using mydumper/myloader for a long time and it has been much faster for us (we have tables with 1B+ rows).

I should note that the version of `mydumper` in the Ubuntu repos is out of date. IIRC 0.9.1 is the latest and Ubuntu packages 0.6.1 on the latest LTS. 0.9.1 has some good improvements so it's worth building yourself (small utility so quick build time).

As always with database stuff, RTFM and use an abundance of caution. In particular, take care to ensure no bad locking behaviors occur.

[falcolas]

+1 to everything here. Use the version out of launchpad, and try it out on a copy of your DB first (though, being a standard mysql client as far as the DB is concerned, its not going to do much damage; especially if you create a read-only backup user first).