Okay, now that I’ve made a major change to this website, I’m back on and will keep this site up! I set this site up as part of my Amazon Web Services (AWS) training. A site like this uses a database to store its information, and mine was using Amazon’s wonderful RDS (relational database service) for my database. RDS has a number of great features; the database is always running, it’s scalable and Amazon does all of the maintenance.
The catch? Cost. Even with the cheapest plan I was paying about $25 a month for the database alone. That’s just too much for a low volume website!
So I came up with a plan: run the database on the same server. It’s not as cool or as flashy, but it will save money which is my ultimate goal. Plus I’ll have to migrate from RDS to a .sql file, how hard could it be, right?
Looking up entries on the web, it turns out there are lots of tutorials on how to do just the opposite: migrate SQL to RDS. This required a lot of digging around. I was hoping for a nice, step-by-step, oral tradition via screenshot guide that would hold my hand through the process. Fortunately, I found something on docs.aws.amazon.com that really fit the bill. Turns out you can run mysqldump on your RDS instance and it will do the job just as if you’re running it on a normal MySQL instance. Viva la cloud-ia!
(Just do you don’t have to rip your hair out like Bender, here is the resource I found.)
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/MySQL.Procedural.Exporting.NonRDSRepl.html
So I ran mysqldump using my RDS instance ID, database root password and it worked like a charm!