I would just like to explain my reasoning behind posting this in case anyone thought it was a simple karma boost or an irrelevant post. I am a system administra

I would just like to explain my reasoning behind posting this in case anyone thought it was a simple karma boost or an irrelevant post. I am a system administrator in a company which uses mysql 5.0.x as its primary data store. He are heavily reliant upon the relational database and use the rich features that mysql provides like triggers, procs, functions and temporary tables. Part of my job is backups and hot standby. Some of these mysql features impose real problems with replication especially in version 5.0.x with statement based replication. Its led us down many paths to fix the problem, even to a point of research mysql proxy and drdb. I found percona's xtrabackup which provides incremental snapshots and goes beyond just looking at the binary logs. Its actually looking and mysql's log sequence numbers which are used to maintain save points. These are crucial in innodb crashes and its part of what percona use to get you back into a running state. This is the closest we've come to easily getting something thats upto date, yes its not going to beat replication but its the best we can do with the constraints we are under.