== What is mydumper? Why? ==

* Parallelism (hence, speed) and performance (avoids expensive character set conversion routines, efficient code overall)
* Easier to manage output (separate files for tables, dump metadata, etc, easy to view/parse data)
* Consistency - maintains snapshot across all threads, provides accurate master and slave log positions, etc
* Manageability - supports PCRE for specifying database and tables inclusions and exclusions

It does not support schema dumping and leaves that to 'mysqldump --no-data'

== How to build it? ==

Run:
 cmake .
 make

One needs to install development versions of required libaries (MySQL, GLib, ZLib, PCRE):

* Ubuntu or Debian: apt-get install libglib2.0-dev libmysqlclient15-dev zlib1g-dev libpcre3-dev
* Fedora, RedHat and CentOS: yum install glib2-devel mysql-devel zlib-devel pcre-devel
* openSUSE: zypper install glib2-devel libmysqlclient-devel pcre-devel zlib-devel
* MacOSX: port install glib2 mysql5 pcre

One has to make sure, that pkg-config, mysql_config, pcre-config are all in $PATH

== How does consistent snapshot work? ==

This is all done following best MySQL practices and traditions:

* As a precaution, slow running queries on the server either abort the dump, or get killed
* Global write lock is acquired ("FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK")
* Various metadata is read ("SHOW SLAVE STATUS","SHOW MASTER STATUS")
* Other threads connect and establish snapshots ("START TRANSACTION WITH CONSISTENT SNAPSHOT")
** On pre-4.1.8 it creates dummy InnoDB table, and reads from it.
* Once all worker threads announce the snapshot establishment, master executes "UNLOCK TABLES" and starts queueing jobs.

This for now does not provide consistent snapshots for non-transactional engines - support for that is expected in 0.2 :)

== How to exclude (or include) databases? ==

Once can use --regex functionality, for example not to dump mysql and test databases:

 mydumper --regex '^(?!(mysql|test))'

Of course, regex functionality can be used to describe pretty much any list of tables.

== How to exclude MERGE or Federated tables ==

Use same --regex exclusion syntax. Again, engine-specific behaviors are targetted for 0.2