slapcat on bdb

Running RH5 openldap 2.3 with "database bdb" in slapd.conf. This has most likely been covered, but I am seeing many conflicting recommendations on running slapcat while slapd is running. The man page states "It is always safe to run slapcat with the slapd-bdb" Which seems very definitive, but I came across another well know guide that states that even though the man page states its ok, slapd should be stopped first before running slapcat.

I'm writing a short backup script to generate nightly ldif output using slapcat and would rather not shut down slapd in the script. Since I have not been running openlap for very long, I was curious if anyone has had any problems running slapcat while slapd was running.