I always trip on level ground

On the lighter side: I’ve always had trouble with mysqldump’s expected syntax. You know, as the author of a book and all that, you might think I can get this to work. But pretty much every time I run this tool, it humiliates me. Witness:

$ mysqldump --host localhost --password secr3t --all-databases
Usage: mysqldump [OPTIONS] database [tables]
OR     mysqldump [OPTIONS] --databases [OPTIONS] DB1 [DB2 DB3...]
OR     mysqldump [OPTIONS] --all-databases [OPTIONS]
For more options, use mysqldump --help

Alas.

Further Reading:

• A review of SecoBackup Amazon S3 backups for MySQL
• Introducing MySQL Parallel Restore
• New Maatkit tool to compute index usage
• How LOCK TABLES interacts with the MySQL slow query log
• Optimal performance out of the box!