Proven technology that has existed in MySQL since 3.23.

Less data written to log files. When updates or deletes affect many rows, this results in much less storage space required for log files. This also means that taking and restoring from backups can be accomplished more quickly.

Log files contain all statements that made any changes, so they can be used to audit the database.

Statements that are unsafe for SBR.  Not all statements which modify data (such as INSERT DELETE, UPDATE, and REPLACE statements) can be replicated using statement-based replication. Any nondeterministic behavior is difficult to replicate when using statement-based replication. Examples of such DML (Data Modification Language) statements include the following:

Statements that cannot be replicated correctly using statement-based replication are logged with a warning like the one shown here:

090213 16:58:54 [Warning] Statement is not safe to log in statement format.

A similar warning is also issued to the client in such cases. The client can display it using SHOW WARNINGS.

INSERT ... SELECT requires a greater number of row-level locks than with row-based replication.

UPDATE statements that require a table scan (because no index is used in the WHERE clause) must lock a greater number of rows than with row-based replication.

For InnoDB: An INSERT statement that uses AUTO_INCREMENT blocks other nonconflicting INSERT statements.

For complex statements, the statement must be evaluated and executed on the slave before the rows are updated or inserted. With row-based replication, the slave only has to modify the affected rows, not execute the full statement.

If there is an error in evaluation on the slave, particularly when executing complex statements, statement-based replication may slowly increase the margin of error across the affected rows over time. See Section 16.4.1.22, “Slave Errors during Replication”.

Stored functions execute with the same NOW() value as the calling statement. However, this is not true of stored procedures.

Deterministic UDFs must be applied on the slaves.

Table definitions must be (nearly) identical on master and slave. See Section 16.4.1.5, “Replication with Differing Table Definitions on Master and Slave”, for more information.

All changes can be replicated. This is the safest form of replication.

For MySQL versions earlier than 5.1.14, DDL (Data Definition Language) statements such as CREATE TABLE are replicated using statement-based replication, while DML statements, as well as GRANT and REVOKE statements, are replicated using row-based replication.

In MySQL 5.1.14 and later, the mysql database is not replicated. The mysql database is instead seen as a node-specific database. Row-based replication is not supported on tables in this database. Instead, statements that would normally update this information — such as GRANT, REVOKE and the manipulation of triggers, stored routines (including stored procedures), and views — are all replicated to slaves using statement-based replication.

For statements such as CREATE TABLE ... SELECT, a CREATE statement is generated from the table definition and replicated using statement-based format, while the row insertions are replicated using row-based format.

The technology is the same as in most other database management systems; knowledge about other systems transfers to MySQL.

Fewer locks are required on the master, which thus achieves higher concurrency, for the following types of statements:

Fewer locks are required on the slave for any INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE statement.

RBR tends to generate more data that must be logged. To replicate a DML statement (such as an UPDATE or DELETE statement), statement-based replication writes only the statement to the binary log. By contrast, row-based replication writes each changed row to the binary log. If the statement changes many rows, row-based replication may write significantly more data to the binary log; this is true even for statements that are rolled back. This also means that taking and restoring from backup can require more time. In addition, the binary log is locked for a longer time to write the data, which may cause concurrency problems.

Deterministic UDFs that generate large BLOB values take longer to replicate with row-based replication than with statement-based replication. This is because the BLOB column value is logged, rather than the statement generating the data.

You cannot examine the logs to see what statements were executed, nor can you see on the slave what statements were received from the master and executed.

However, beginning with MySQL 5.1.29, you can see what data was changed using mysqlbinlog with the options --base64-output=DECODE-ROWS and --verbose.

Formerly, when performing a bulk operation that includes nontransactional storage engines, changes were applied as the statement executed. With row-based logging, this meant that the binary log was written while the statement was running. On the master, this does not cause problems with concurrency, because tables are locked until the bulk operation terminates. On the slave server, tables were not locked while the slave applied changes, because the slave did not know that those changes were part of a bulk operation.

In such cases, if you retrieved data from a table on the master (for example, using SELECT * FROM table_name), the server waited for the bulk operation to complete before executing the SELECT statement, because the table was read-locked. On the slave, the server did not wait (because there was no lock). This meant that, until the bulk operation on the slave completed, different results were obtained for the same SELECT query on the master and on the slave.

This issue was resolved in MySQL 5.1.24. (Bug#29020)