Hey all Magento administrators or developers out there, just a short tip here on how to avoid locking tables when you perform a full mysqldump on a live server. This does not apply for any shared hosting, but only the more advanced dedicated hosting (VPS/cloud or not). When you perform a mysqldump on a live environment, the default behaviour is to lock the entire set of tables until the dump is complete, even if it takes 1 minute or less, it means that during that minute, users will not be able to checkout, or admins may not be able to perform any transactions in the back end.