You tried phpmyadmin, you tried cat some_large_file | mysql -uuser -p -Ddatabase but it complains too? Then simply do SOURCE <large file name> while in the mysql console and it will work.
The only problem could be if you still get the error on some lines is to increase the max_allowed_packet if there are large blob’s in your dump.
There are some alternatives like BigDump, but that’s installing additional tools for the job which is not always necessary.
Did you know that this:
SELECT * FROM test WHERE binary login = ‘SomeCaseSensitiveLogin’
is million times slower then
SELECT * FROM test WHERE login = ‘SomeCaseSensitiveLogin’ AND binary login = ‘SomeCaseSensitiveLogin’
Of course the logical choice would be to have a binary index on login(like in this example of case sensitive searches in mysql), but sometimes the MySQL version is too old or buggy or you simply don’t have the permission to do so, and I even had a situation where this was faster then any other method, but as always it depends on the data you have.
In my example it was a 40.000 rows user database and the search was taking 0.21 secs with pure binary vs 0.00 with this trick above.