One of my colleagues from my time at Percona worked fairly extensively on Mydumper and Myloader; making the locking semantics better and the segemented files work. It's a pretty amazing tool, since it lets you dump tables in parallel, with very granular locks (something mydumper does not allow).<p>As a logical backup tool, it's invaluable. When combined with binary logs and regular binary backups, it makes for a nice and comprehensive MySQL backup solution. It even works with managed DB services like RDS.<p>YMMV of course, but given how easy it is to test for your own use cases, it's absolutely worth taking a look at.