Backup MySQL databases automatically

With mysqldump anyone can write a small shell script and running it from cron, it will achieve an automatic backup solution. There are many such scripts already available freely and also many commercial solutions also (I assume as I have not tested any really ). The script that I liked the most is AutoMySQLBackup, because it doesn’t have any real requirements (mysqldump of course is needed - in any mysql client package - and gzip or bzip2 to compress the resulting file) and has all the features I was looking for in such a script.