Sometimes a database is just too big for phpMyadmin to export so you need to be able to export the database to a .sql file and maybe zipped too.
This can be done using the following syntax : mysqldump -u [username] -p [database-you-want-to-dump] > [path-to-place-data-dump]
mysqldump -u username -p database-you-want-to-dump > path-to-place-data-dump.sql //if you want to specifiy the password mysqldump -u username -p"password" database-you-want-to-dump > path-to-place-data-dump.sql //if you need to zip the output file mysqldump -u username -p"password" database-you-want-to-dump | gzip > export_db.sql.gz