MySQL: How to export a database / table to XML?

You can export any MySQL database or table into an XML file by the exporting capabilities of phpMyAdmin, the web interface of MySQL. The problem with this approach, however, is that with large tables, you may have to manually export the table more than once by sections into several sequential XML files.

A better approach is by native MySQL command line that will create and store all entries of the table into one XML file:

mysql -u db_user -p db_name --xml -e "SELECT * FROM table_name" > table_name.xml

Wherein db_user is your MySQL server user, db_name is the name of the database and table_name is the name of the table that you would like exported to XML. The resulted XML will be stored in table_name.xml.

Note that this is different from mysqldump in that it’s basically executing a query by the –e switch and output the results in XML (–xml). The results is then directed to the out file rather than displayed on terminal screen.