For Geeks

Warning: Contains geeky content

To export a complete mysql database to sql:
mysqldump --user=username --password=password --databases database_name --opt --quote-names --allow-keywords --complete-insert | bzip2 -c > your_database.sql.bz2

To export from mysql to csv:
mysql -u username -ppassword --batch -e "select * from mytable"  mydatabase > mydata.csv

Import data from csv to mysql:
load data local infile 'mydata.csv' into table mytable fields terminated by ',' enclosed by '"' lines terminated by '\n' (field1, field2, field3)

Backup mysql database:
mysqlhotcopy db_name /path/to/some/dir