Creating an archive (php/mysql)

[the tree]

Having performed a search for all records with a datestamp from more than a month ago, I would want to remove all those records and put them into an archive of some sort, maybe compressed.
What type of thing should I be doing, does MySQL have some capability for returning with a whole file that I could use PHP to save?

[chazzy]

most dba's use something like perl or python for tasks like this, not PHP, but this isn't something "built in" to mysql, you'd need to write the script to read all the entries older than 30 days, put them in a file, delete from the table and gzip the file.