I am attempting to export my 191mb database via phpmyadmin. I've done this many times before, and the exported .sql file always comes out to around the same size as the database. Now, when I do it, my exported .sql file is a mere 17mb. I am not using any compression. Any idea why this is happening? I can't tell if it's got the whole DB in there or not, but I'm guess that at that size it does not.
Do you have a lot of char columns vs varchar? These are fixed length so the database size is not proportional to what it will be exported in a text file. Zero-fill columns will also do this.