Well you can almost get there (completely if you're not changing schemas): mysqldump --single-transaction This option sends a START TRANSACTION SQL statement

Well you can almost get there (completely if you're not changing schemas): mysqldump --single-transaction This option sends a START TRANSACTION SQL statement to the server before dumping data. It is useful only with transactional tables such as InnoDB, because then it dumps the consistent state of the database at the time when BEGIN was issued without blocking any applications.