In August 2006 I made a post about the MySQL blackhole engine and its possible use for replication scenarios.
Back then the primary focus was to reduce the amount of data being transferred between master and possible many slaves during normal business. This speeds up processing on the slaves, because they have considerably less data to first store to their relay logs and then immediately discard again.
What still takes a lot of time is the initial setup of a slave system. This is because there is a potentially large SQL based dump file to be executed on maybe relatively low-end systems (e. g. Celeron CPUs and single IDE hard drives). While this can be made to work reliably with a set of scripts to automate the process of downloading a zipped SQL file from a local server and running it against the clients' databases, it …
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