James Cheng <jcheng@tivo.com> writes:

The binlog stream has all the row data, but doesn't have everything. It doesn't have column names, for example, or primary keys, or character sets. Using the binlog for replication seems to assume that you have a copy of the schema beforehand on the receiving slave. It doesn't seem possible to replicate to a slave using only the information in the binlogs.

It is a common request to be able to do 3rd-party replication from mysqld. However, the replication protocol between master and slave servers was never designed as a public API, it is based on internal data formats and so on. So unfortunately, there does not exist currently a public API for doing external replication, at least not that I am aware of. The binlog stream _does_ have everything of course, eg. in the form of CREATE TABLE statements and so on. However, being internal to the server, they are not very easy to use by an external replication mechanism. - Kristian.