Export and Import a compressed MySQL dump

I've had to do this so many times that I'm putting on my blog as a reminder of how useful it is.

MySQL dumps are not compressed. The result is a flat text file which has a lot of room for compression. Using gzip can save a lot of space when downloading MySQL dump files. The dump can be compressed while it is being downloaded like this:

mysqldump -u {user} -p {database}  | gzip > outputfile.sql.gz

Likewise, it can be uncompressed while importing it back into MySQL:

gunzip < outputfile.sql.gz | mysql -u {user} -p {database}