This example will show you how to log your MySQL Proxy output to a log file rather than to the terminal.

In two words: online operations. In a paragraph: Forget partitioning, row-based replication and events. The big reasons most people are going to salivate over 5.1, and probably start plans to upgrade now, are the online operations: \tonline ALTER TABLE for column rename, column default value change, and adding values to the end of an ENUM/SET\tOnline, table-based logging. No more need to restart your server to enable or change the general or slow query logs. You can have the standard file-based output or choose a table format...which you can query.

There is a cool option for mysqlbinlog for disabling the binary log when doing recovery using binary logs, namely --disable-log-bin. There are various ways for doing this.