Backing up mysql database and restore

This is also needed when you need to move your database elsewhere.
To backup your database -

mysqldump --user <mysql_username> --password=<mysql_password> <database> [<tablename>] > <output_filename>

To restore/initiate from the backup

mysql --user <db_username> --password=<db_password> <dbname> < <dump_file>

Rails Time and Database

Last few days I improved rails code related to time function in several places.

1.
Rails extended basic Time class to give output in several format. So that you can output in database datetime format by passing :db symbol as argument to Time's to_s() method. Previously I produced database format manually

Time.now.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S").to_s

now, it simplifies to

Time.now.to_s(:db)

Detail documentation can be found here

2.
To parse database date to ruby Time, I used this.

Time.parse(token.created_at.to_s)

where created_at is DateTime type field in Token model

3.
To get back-and-forth between Unix Timestamp and ruby Time, you can simply use -

Time.now.to_i

and to read -

Time.at(unix_timestamp)