What is 'Maximal length of created query' in exporting a database

Question

I am using phpMyAdmin and I want to export all of the data from the database. Does the property 'Maximal length of created query' affect the amount of data you export?

Answer 1

No, it doesn't. It does affect the size of the exported file somewhat. The only thing that happens is that it limits the number of inserted rows per INSERT statement. So you end up with more, smaller statements.

Here's some info from their wiki:

The option 'Maximal length of created query' seems to be undocumented. But experiments has shown that it splits large extended INSERTS so each one is no bigger than the given number of bytes (or characters?). Thus when importing the file, for large tables you avoid the error "Got a packet bigger than 'max_allowed_packet' bytes". See http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/packet-too-large.html