w i c k e d    l u s h !

I have a cron job on a web server that periodically runs mysqldump and emails me a zip file containing the database backups. I looked at one of them recently, and instead of the full DB dump, all it had in was this:

-- MySQL dump 10.11
--
-- Host: localhost    Database: dbname
-- ------------------------------------------------------
-- Server version	5.0.37-standard-log

/*!40101 SET @OLD_CHARACTER_SET_CLIENT=@@CHARACTER_SET_CLIENT */;
/*!40101 SET @OLD_CHARACTER_SET_RESULTS=@@CHARACTER_SET_RESULTS */;
/*!40101 SET @OLD_COLLATION_CONNECTION=@@COLLATION_CONNECTION */;
/*!40101 SET NAMES utf8 */;
/*!40103 SET @OLD_TIME_ZONE=@@TIME_ZONE */;
/*!40103 SET TIME_ZONE='+00:00' */;
/*!40014 SET @OLD_UNIQUE_CHECKS=@@UNIQUE_CHECKS, UNIQUE_CHECKS=0 */;
/*!40014 SET @OLD_FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=@@FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS,
FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0 */;
/*!40101 SET @OLD_SQL_MODE=@@SQL_MODE, SQL_MODE
='NO_AUTO_VALUE_ON_ZERO' */;
/*!40111 SET @OLD_SQL_NOTES=@@SQL_NOTES, SQL_NOTES=0 */;

…and when I try running sqldump from the command line I get:

mysqldump: Got error: 1044: Access denied for user ‘usrname’@'%’ to database ‘dbname’ when using LOCK TABLES

After lots of fruitless Googling, I came across this page, which says the problem can be overcome by using the “–skip-lock-tables” flag, like this:

  mysqldump --skip-lock-tables -u usrname -p  dbname >  backup.sql

Worked perfectly!