One of the benefits I get for working at EMC is access to a large pool of incredibly talented folks. One of these folks, Denis Jannot, created a video where he has used Named Pipes and the avtar client in the Avamar software solution to allow PostgreSQL and MySQL to backup directly to an Avamar grid without having to dump a file locally first.
Watch the demo at http://www.recorditblog.com/?p=91
Digital IRL 