The events table was introduced to MySQL in 5.1.6 and when upgrading you will start to see the warning “Warning: Skipping the data of table mysql.event” when using mysqldump. This is not an error as such, but more to make it clear to you that something has changed.
How to include the event table with mysqldump
Use the –events flag when using mysqldump to include the events table:
mysqldump -u[username] -p --events mysql > mysql.sql
This will then suppress the warning message from the output.
How to exclude the event table with mysqldump
Use the –ignore-table flag when using mysqldump to exclude the events table like so:
mysqldump -u[username] -p --ignore-table=mysql.event mysql > mysql.sql
This will then suppress the warning message from the output.
Output when using -T / –tab flag
This is an update the day after originally writing this post. Using the above flags suppresses output when doing a straight SQL dump to file. When using the -T / –tab flag to write the data out to tabbed data files, you will still get this output when dumping events:
-- -- Dumping events for database 'mysql' --
and this when attempting to ignore the table (which is the original message addressed by this post):
-- Warning: Skipping the data of table mysql.event. Specify the --events option explicitly.
This happens for me on two different servers which run MySQL 5.1.73. If anyone has any suggestions about how to suppress this output, while allowing other errors/warnings to be displayed, it would be greatly appreciated to prevent output from being emailed from automated backup processes.