Recently I was playing around with the Maatkit tools specifically mk-parallel-dump and mk-parallel-restore for refreshing development database copies with production copies. A problem arises when BLOB data is being displayed on the console and transforming my shell prompt into gibberish and missing the results of the restore. Breaking the restore as soon as the BLOB starts output, it was revealed that I was getting the “Got a packet bigger then ‘max_allowed_packet’ bytes” error. After setting this variable to a reasonable value the restore went smoothly.