Ironically, the Stream algorithm I wrote as the simplest possible syncing algorithm does what the much more efficient algorithm I wrote some time ago can't do: sync a table without a primary key, as long as there are no duplicate rows. In fact, it's so dumb, it will happily sync any table, even if there are no indexes.

The flash of inspiration I had on Friday has turned out to be good...

My initial plans got waylaid! I didn't pull out the checksumming code first, because the code wasn't at all as I remembered it. Instead, I began writing code to handle the more abstract problem of accepting two sets of rows, finding the differences, and doing something with them. I'm ending up with a little more complicated system than I thought I would. However, it's also significantly simpler in some ways. Instead of just passing references to subroutines to use as callbacks, I'm object-ifying the entire synchronization concept...

Tomorrow is the first of five days I will spend working on mk-table-sync, the data synchronization tool I developed as part of Maatkit. The first thing I’ll do is pull the row-checksumming code out into a module and write a unit test suite for it. I’ll probably add the code to the module [...]

I am considering taking some time off work to concentrate deeply on MySQL Table Sync, which has been getting usage in very large companies whose names we all know. There are a lot of bugs and feature requests outstanding for it. It is overly complex, needs a lot of work, and I can't do it in one-hour or even three-hour chunks. I need to focus on it. I'm considering asking for a bounty of $2500 USD for this. Please let me know what you think of this; it seems to be a successful way to sponsor development on some other projects, like Vim.

For the amount of time I think this will take, $2500 is far below my per-hour consulting rate; I considered setting the bounty higher, but I think this will be a fair amount.

I would not begin this project before December at the earliest, so there's some time to raise funds and time for me to continue working on High Performance …