How to import a big mysql dump (dealing with error 2006)

Importing a MySQL dump is theoretically pretty trivial:
mysql -u [username] -p [databasename] < [C:\Path\DumpName.sql]

However, in order to achieve a better speed by making fewer but large queries, phpMyAdmin tends to do things like:

INSERT INTO `sometable` (`field1`, `field12`, `field3`) VALUES
(1, 2, 40),
(1, 3, 21),
(8, 7, 35),
(1, 8, 29),
(1, 5, 41),
(5, 1, 39);

... but with much much more lines. For instance I had such a query containing over 36,000 table lines packed into a single INSERT. That's great for speed (the whole database import, total almost 38,000 lines, took a fraction of a second), but not so great for a default MySQL installation: the first time I tried to run it, I got this error message:

ERROR 2006 (HY000): MySQL server has gone away

I eventually found that this was due to too large packets. The solution is then simply to configure MySQL to accept larger packets: at the end of your my.ini (that’s the MySQL configuration file, on Windows it’s in a folder parent to the MySQL binaries folder), add the following line:

max_allowed_packet = 128M

That should be enough to deal with very large inserts already, but if you keep getting the error (after restarting the server to apply the change) I guess you can try even higher values.