title: Magento Installation Roadmap Clarification
body: <p>I am working to upgrade a Magento 1.5 site to 1.8.1 -- I have followed the roadmap found at the link below:</p>
  
  <p><a href="http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base/entry/ce18-upgrade-roadmap" rel="nofollow">http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base/entry/ce18-upgrade-roadmap</a></p>
  
  <p>This article says that I should 
  (1) install Magento fresh on a Dev Server, which I've done. Doing this requires an empty database to install Magento 1.8 with, which I've done. </p>
  
  <p>(3) Import Production Database onto an empty Development Database instance.</p>
  
  <p>The only way I've found to import a database as large as this one (~3GB) is to use BigDump to take my SQL dump from PHPMyAdmin and import it into a blank database. I am not confident in this plan though.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a way that Magento offers to help move databases between Production and Development servers? The Roadmap left that a bit vague.</p>