Live projects database are always critical for Clients and Companies and if the development phase is still in progress than you need to take backup of database on daily basis for safety concerns. i came across with the same situation and for that i've created a simple script which will take backup of your database.
it will export table wise separate sql file rather than one big SQL file. you can also make zip file for all the tables with gzipped option (dbname.gz).
This script is created for MySQL database only and it;s been tested on Mac OS X and Ubuntu OS.
You need to set path for MySQLDump and MySQL in script file.