TL;DR version: The backup locks feature introduced in Percona Server 5.6.16-64.0 is a lightweight alternative to FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK and can be used to take both physical and logical backups with less downtime on busy servers. To employ the feature with mysqldump, use mysqldump --lock-for-backup --single-transaction. The next release of Percona XtraBackup will also be using backup locks automatically if the target server supports the feature.

Now on to the gory details, but let’s start with some history.

In the beginning…

In the beginning there was FLUSH TABLES, and users messed with their MyISAM tables under a live server and were not ashamed. Users could do nice things like:

mysql> FLUSH TABLES;
# execute myisamchk, myisampack, backup / restore some tables, etc.

And users were happy until someone realized that tables must be …