Gentlemen,
The problem of how to generate a MySQL backup quickly via PHP quickly and efficiently has been stumping me for a while. I know the mysqldump trick, but for some reason under cPanel it generates needlessly bloated SQL I cannot even feed into phpMyAdmin. I have examined phpMyAdmin's code, but cannot figure out the exact part which enables it to export SQL so quickly. So I have been left with no choice to write code that generates insert statements one at a time. Very inefficient, and now my boss is getting maximum execution timeouts on one particularly large database.
Any insight that you might be able to offer would be much appreciated.