4.1.2 Replication and BLACKHOLE Tables

The BLACKHOLE storage engine accepts data but discards it and does not store it. When performing binary logging, all inserts to such tables are always logged, regardless of the logging format in use. Updates and deletes are handled differently depending on whether statement based or row based logging is in use. With the statement based logging format, all statements affecting BLACKHOLE tables are logged, but their effects ignored. When using row-based logging, updates and deletes to such tables are simply skipped—they are not written to the binary log. A warning is logged whenever this occurs (Bug #13004581).

For this reason we recommend when you replicate to tables using the BLACKHOLE storage engine that you have the binlog_format server variable set to STATEMENT, and not to either ROW or MIXED.