Importing MySQL dumps made on 64-bit servers

It’s tough to find examples of dumps that can’t be properly reimported on other servers. However, if you have a 64-bit server, and you make a MySQL dump file from it, you may see this issue when importing the dump on a 32-bit MySQL server:

ERROR 1118 (42000) at line 1686: Row size too large. The maximum row size for the used table type, not counting BLOBs, is 65535. You have to change some columns to TEXT or BLOBs

You really don’t have any options in this situation. You’ll need to adjust your table on the 64-bit server for good and then make a new dump file, or you will just have to live with the fact that it can’t be imported into a 32-bit instance of MySQL.