For the time I've been testing, I've used the procedures outlined in the help to take my backups, which entails doing a FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK in my MySQL monitor, then going to a shell prompt and executing the mysqldump utility, then issuing the UNLOCK TABLES from my MySQL monitor.
Now I'm trying to schedule all this and I have a question about using just mysqldump. If I use the --lock-tables parm, am I getting the same functionality? The reason I'm concerned is because the help says: The FLUSH TABLES statement is needed to ensure that the all active index pages are written to disk before you start the backup. Can I make sure that happens without moving back and forth between the MySQL monitor and the mysqldump utility? Thanks, Lou
