Evil replication management

When one wants to script automated replication chain building, certain things are quite annoying, like immutable replication configuration variables. For example, at certain moments log_slave_updates is more than needed, and thats what the server says:

mysql> show variables like 'log_slave_updates';
+-------------------+-------+
| Variable_name     | Value |
+-------------------+-------+
| log_slave_updates | OFF   |
+-------------------+-------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> set global log_slave_updates=1;
ERROR 1238 (HY000): Variable 'log_slave_updates' is a read only variable

Of course, there are few options, roll in-house fork (heheeeee!), restart your server, and keep warming up your tens of gigabytes of cache arenas, or wait for MySQL to ship a feature change in next major release. Then there are evil tactics:

mysql> system gdb -p $(pidof mysqld)
                       -ex "set opt_log_slave_updates=1" -batch
mysql> show variables like 'log_slave_updates';
+-------------------+-------+
| Variable_name     | Value |
+-------------------+-------+
| log_slave_updates | ON    |
+-------------------+-------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

I don’t guarantee safety of this when slave is running, but… stopping and starting slave threads is somewhat cheaper, than stopping and starting big database instance, right?

What else can we do?

mysql> show slave status \G
...
     Replicate_Do_DB: test
...
mysql> system gdb -p $(pidof mysqld)
          -ex 'call rpl_filter->add_do_db(strdup("hehehe"))' -batch
mysql> show slave status \G
...
      Replicate_Do_DB: test,hehehe
...

It is actually possible to add all sorts of filters this way, rpl_filter.h can be good reference :) So now that you want to throw out some data from your slaves, restart isn’t needed. Unfortunately, deleting entries isn’t possible via rpl_filter methods, but you can always edit base_ilists, can’t you?

P.S. having this functionality inside server would definitely be best.