George Herbert wrote:
This may be an argument for using PostgreSQL instead of MySQL for your site
- the PostgreSQL "pg_dump" command doesn't cause a read or write lock on the
database, so nobody using it gets blocked. Things do slow down a bit, but you can keep right on reading or updating through the dump.
Even mysqlhotcopy has a moderate lock window.
mysqldump on InnoDB is the same, if you use the right options. No locking, just multi-versioned copy-on-write tables. That's how we used to do backups before we had slaves that we could stop.
-- Tim Starling