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I want to copy a live production database into my local development database. Is there a way to do this without locking the production database?

I'm currently using:

mysqldump -u root --password=xxx -h xxx my_db1 | mysql -u root --password=xxx -h localhost my_db1

But it's locking each table as it runs.

Answers

Does the --lock-tables=false option work?

According to the man page, if you are dumping InnoDB tables you can use the --single-transaction option:

--lock-tables, -l

Lock all tables before dumping them. The tables are locked with READ
LOCAL to allow concurrent inserts in the case of MyISAM tables. For
transactional tables such as InnoDB and BDB, --single-transaction is
a much better option, because it does not need to lock the tables at
all.

For innodb DB:

mysqldump --single-transaction=TRUE -u username -p DB