Imagine you had a car site and needed to load MySQL with a big database or car prices so that you can provide a search against this data. Well, imagine the database is so large that it won’t load for you. This can happen if you have a database that’s a bit larger than your server can handle.

I had a bit of a problem today trying to get an 8Mb backup uploaded into MySQL. The problem was caused by the fact that phpMyAdmin was timing out when I tried to import the database. I tried breaking it down into smaller sections but a couple of the tables just had too many rows in them. Just as I was about to bang my head against the wall, I came across BigDump, a MySQL upload tool that staggers the uploads allowing you to upload dump files up to 50Mb in size.