Being a data recovery specialist and having recovered countless GBs of corrupted, and/or stranded, InnoDB data in my days, I am very happy to hear about the new InnoDB Transportable Tablespaces coming in MySQL 5.6!
Back in the day, if you had a stranded .ibd file (the individual InnoDB data file with –innodb-file-per-table option), you basically had nothing (even though that file contained all of the data). This was because unless you had the original instance that that particular .ibd file (table) originated from, there was no way to load it, import, or dump from it. So it was not of much use, though all the data was *right* there.
Thus I created the method of Recovering an InnoDB table from only an .ibd file (I should note that this was before the …
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