Row based replication has some important advantages:
* **It minimizes in most cases the replication lag (that we suffer in sometimes)**
* **It minimizes slave drift, that we are suffering now**
* More prone to break replication if a schema or data difference is detected (fails faster)
* It usually end up with reduced contention, better performance and less locking needed
It has some disadvantages:
* Increased size of binary logs, that affects both disk space and bandwidth needed. In edge cases (large blobs), it could impact binary logs performance when written to disk (configuration should be tuned)
* More prone to break replication if a schema or data difference is detected (fails faster)
* Performance may not be great if slaves do not have proper primary keys
* It requires an external tool (mysqlbinlog) in order to know the underlying query- maybe more difficult to debug; changes are not shown on `show processlist` by the system threads
* Sanitarium requires statement-based binary logs in order to filter rows to labsdbs
* It makes impossible or more difficult to use some tools like `pt-table-checksum` in multi-tiered setups (for codfw, for labs)
This ticket is to decide if this change is worth it, how to do it, where (maybe not all servers require it), when and what blockers there are.