How should I migrate a large MySQL database to RDS?
I just recently spent a lot of time trying to figure out a 15GB transition to RDS. Ended up finding a script on one of the amazon forums that I modified to my own uses and seems to work well. I'm not sure if you can do single transaction, but the dump itself is very quick compared to the actual transfer. I think 15GB only took me 12 minutes to dump, so even if it doesn't have single transaction option I don't think you'd have a very long span of time for inconsistencies to occur. I'm not sure if that's good enough for you, but I found the solution a lot more graceful than the flat file method.

#!/bin/bash

declare -a dbs=(dbname1 dbname2 dbname3 dbname4);

j=0
while [ $j -lt 4 ];
#4 is the number of dbs
do

echo "Dumping ${dbs[$j]} DB"
time mysqldump --order-by-primary --host=sourcehost --user=sourceuser --password=sourcepass `echo ${dbs[$j]}` &gt; /tmp/`echo ${dbs[$j]}`.sql
echo "Adding optimizations to ${dbs[$j]}"
awk 'NR==1{$0="SET autocommit=0; SET unique_checks=0; SET foreign_key_checks=0;\n"$0}1' /tmp/`echo ${dbs[$j]}`.sql &gt;&gt; /tmp/`echo ${dbs[$j]}`X.sql
mv /tmp/`echo ${dbs[$j]}`X.sql /tmp/`echo ${dbs[$j]}`.sql
echo "SET unique_checks=1; SET foreign_key_checks=1; COMMIT;" &gt;&gt; /tmp/`echo ${dbs[$j]}`.sql
echo "Copy ${dbs[$j]} into RDS"
time mysql --host=yourrds.rds.amazonaws.com --user=rdsuser --password=rdspassword `echo ${dbs[$j]}` &lt; /tmp/`echo ${dbs[$j]}`.sql &amp;

j=$(($j+1))
done