It is possible to replicate transactional tables on the master using nontransactional tables on the slave. For example, you can replicate an InnoDB master table as a MyISAM slave table. However, if you do this, there are problems if the slave is stopped in the middle of a BEGIN/COMMIT block because the slave restarts at the beginning of the BEGIN block.

Mixing transactional and nontransactional statements within the same transaction.  The semantics of mixing nontransactional and transactional tables in a transaction in the first statement of a transaction changed in MySQL 5.1.31. Previously, if the first statement in a transaction contained nontransactional changes, the statement was written directly to the binary log, in an attempt to mimic the nontransactional behavior of the statement. Beginning with MySQL 5.1.31, any statement appearing after a BEGIN is always considered part of the transaction and cached. This means that nontransactional changes do not propagate to the slave until the transaction is committed and thus written to the binary log. In addition (also beginning with MySQL 5.1.31), if AUTOMCOMMIT is set to 0, any statement appearing immediately following a COMMIT is handled in the same way.

Previously, a statement was considered nontransactional if it changed a nontransactional table. This behavior had the following subtle but nontrivial consequences:

In situations where transactions mix updates to transactional and nontransactional tables, the order of statements in the binary log is correct, and all needed statements are written to the binary log even in case of a ROLLBACK. However, when a second connection updates the nontransactional table before the first connection's transaction is complete, statements can be logged out of order, because the second connection's update is written immediately after it is performed, regardless of the state of the transaction being performed by the first connection.

Due to the nontransactional nature of MyISAM tables, it is possible to have a statement that only partially updates a table and returns an error code. This can happen, for example, on a multiple-row insert that has one row violating a key constraint, or if a long update statement is killed after updating some of the rows. If that happens on the master, the slave thread exits and waits for the database administrator to decide what to do about it unless the error code is legitimate and execution of the statement results in the same error code on the slave. If this error code validation behavior is not desirable, some or all errors can be masked out (ignored) with the --slave-skip-errors option.

When the storage engine type of the slave is nontransactional, transactions on the master that mix updates of transactional and nontransactional tables should be avoided because they can cause inconsistency of the data between the master's transactional table and the slave's nontransactional table. That is, such transactions can lead to master storage engine-specific behavior with the possible effect of replication going out of synchrony. MySQL does not issue a warning about this currently, so extra care should be taken when replicating transactional tables from the master to nontransactional ones on the slaves.