phpMyAdmin has an upload size limit, and a large database import will fail part-way through – often leaving the database half-populated, which is worse than not starting.
Signs you have hit the limit
The import ends with no error and not everything is there, or the browser times out, or you get a maximum execution time message. If your dump file is more than a few tens of megabytes, expect this.
What to do instead
Compress it first
phpMyAdmin accepts gzip files directly. A SQL dump usually compresses to a small fraction of its size, and that alone gets many imports under the limit.
Split it
For a very large dump, splitting it into several files and importing each in turn works, provided you keep them in order.
Ask us to import it
This is usually the quickest route. Upload the dump to your account – over FTP or in File Manager – and open a ticket telling us the file name and which database to import it into. We can do it at the command line where none of these limits apply, and it takes moments.
Before importing over an existing database
An import usually drops and recreates the tables, destroying what is there. If the target database is not empty, export it first. If you meant to merge rather than replace, stop – that is a different job and an import will not do it.
Character sets
If imported text shows odd characters where apostrophes and accents should be, the dump was made with a different character set. Re-export specifying UTF-8 rather than trying to repair the text afterwards.
