ibrathesheriff ~ $ cat /notes/mysqldump-couldnt-execute.md

Mysqldump Couldn't Execute

published: July 21, 2026
tags: databases | mysql | database-backups |
reading time: 1 minutes

by @ibrathesheriff ibrathesheriff x/twitter icon

I was preparing a database host migration on Pythonanywhere. The help article stated that all I had to do was execute:

mysqldump -u yourusername -h yourusername.mysql.pythonanywhere-services.com --set-gtid-purged=OFF --no-tablespaces 'yourusername$dbname'  > db-backup.sql

So I did, and the following error occurred:

mysqldump: Couldn't execute 'SELECT COLUMN_NAME,                       JSON_EXTRACT(HISTOGRAM, '$."number-of-buckets-specified"')                FROM information_schema.COLUMN_STATISTICS                WHERE S
CHEMA_NAME = 'uthanzi$hackthedegree' AND TABLE_NAME = 'code_reviews';': Unknown table 'COLUMN_STATISTICS' in information_schema (1109)

There was an issue with column statistics so to leave them out I used this instead:

mysqldump -u yourusername -h yourusername.mysql.pythonanywhere-services.com --no-tablespaces --single-transaction --column-statistics=0 -p 'yourusername$dbname' > db-backup.sql

My database was on a 5.7 MySQL server so it didn’t have the COLUMN_STATISTICS table. So by adding --column-statistics=0 the query is skipped entirely.