Fixing mysqldump unknown table COLUMN_STATISTICS

I am by no means a database guy. I am barely even a server guy. But, recently, I was tasked with exporting a sizeable database from Amazon RDS for use with local development servers.

After running the following mysqldump command:

mysqldump --host hostname -u username -p dbname > dbdump.sql

I am asked for the database password and then proceed to get an error complaining about an unknown table called COLUMN_STATISTICS. Unknown indeed, I had no idea what this table was even for or why mysqldump was trying to query it.

In a classic case of RTFM, I discovered that it’s some newly added thing in MySQL client 8.

mysqldump --column-statistics=0 --host hostname -u username -p dbname > dbdump.sql

We add the column-statistics flag to our command and set it to 0 to disable it, and the error goes away. The moral of the story is read the documentation.