The mysqldump
output format is simply a long list of SQL commands, meant to be fed back into the mysql
program.
You can use mysqldump --ignore-table=<database>.<table>
to create a dump that does not include the access_log
table at all.
Then you can use mysqldump --no-data=true
to dump just the structure for the access_log
table.
If you concatenate the two, you will have a complete dump script that excludes the data for the access_log
table.
As long as you only need to do this for one or a few tables, and control the original mysqldump invocation, that should be a practical solution.
Googled for mysqldump exclude table, which brought up my main source of inspiration which was the Skip certain tables with mysqldump Stack Overflow question, and its accepted answer.