Rsync friendly database dumps
I frequently use mysqldump in scripts @ work. For transferring databases to test environments and for various backup purposes.
I noticed a gzipped SQL dump could take a long time to transfer even though the changes were negligible. After a little research I came up with to tips on getting blazing fast transfers:
mysqldump --skip-dump-date: Skip the date-stamp in the SQL file, an identical database will generate an identical dump even though time passes.
gzip --rsyncable: From man gzip: While compressing, synchronize the output occasionally based on the input. This increases size by less than 1 percent most cases, but means that the rsync(1) program can much more efficiently synchronize files compressed with this flag.
Put those two together and you saved yourself a lot of bandwidth.
