Inspired by a Slashdot book review of High Performance MySQL.

I've often suspected that I'm not a SQL guru… little things like being self taught and having virtually no resources for learning it. This has been confirmed to a large degree at work, where our DBA has taught me many tricks about databases: indexing, when to use DISTINCT, how and when to do JOINs, and the magic of TEMPORARY TABLEs. I now feel fairly competent, though far from being an expert — I certainly don't know much about how to tune a server for MySQL, or tuning MySQL for performance.

Last year around this time, we needed to replace our MySQL server, and I got handed the job of getting the data from the old one onto the new. At the time, I looked into replication, and from there discovered about binary copies of a data store. I started using this as a way to backup data, instead of periodic mysqldumps.

One thing I've often wondered since: would replication be a good way to do backups? It seems like it would, but I haven't investigated. One post on the aforementioned Slashdot article addressed this, with the following summary:

1. Set up replication
2. Do a locked table backup on the slave

Concise and to the point. I only wish I had a spare server on which to implement it!