I’m used to using PHPMyAdmin (PMA) for managing my MySQL databases. It works fine for normal maintenance, like getting rid of the spam comments that sneak through my checks (of which there are, or rather were, none), but while setting up the new version of this site, I found myself wanting to transfer the entire contents of the database to my home computer so I could tinker with it and try to figure out how to convert it to the new format I needed. PMA doesn’t really do that. Sure, it can manage multiple servers, but it treats each one separately; as far as I know the only option for transferring data is to export it to a text file and import it into the new database. I’ve never had particularly great luck with PMA’s export function, and besides, since the whole structure was changing, I needed to take the information in each table of the existing database and split it up among different tables in the new database. I briefly considered processing SQL dump files with a Perl script but it quickly became evident that that would be a mess.

So I went to my …