MySQL needs a way of creating real-time backups.  The current method of doing

this is to create a slave with using the blackhole engine as can be seen at the

following URL:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/blackhole-storage-engine.html

This method works rather well but has the disadvantage of requiring a whole

MySQL instance to run to make the real-time backups, this can be a burden on

resources and difficult to setup if you are trying to backup many MySQL servers.

We already have mysqlbinlog to talk to remote MySQL servers to retrieve binlog

data and translate it into SQL statements so in theory it should be easy enough

to create a raw mode for the output.

Solution

mysqlbinlog has been modified to have several new parameters, key to this is the

new --raw flag which writes the data out in raw binlog format rather than

translating it.  The other parameter changes are designed to add more

functionality to the --raw flag so that it can easily be used in various backup

scenarios.