I have a series of databases, each of which is basically standalone. It initially seemed like I needed a replication solution, but the more I researched it, the more it felt like replication was overkill and not useful anyway. I have not done MySQL replication before, so I have been reading up on the online docs, googling, and searching SO for relevant questions, but I can't find a scenario quite like mine. Here is a brief description of my issue:
- The various databases almost never have a live connection to each other.
- They need to be able to "sync" by copying files to a thumb drive and then moving them to the proper destination.
- It is OK for the data to not match exactly, but they should have the same parent-child relationships. That is, if a generated key differs between databases, no big deal. But the visible data must match.
- Timing is not critical. Updates can be done a week later, or even a month later, as long as they are done eventually.
- Updates cannot be guaranteed to be in the proper order, or in any order for that matter. They will be in order from each database; just not between databases.
- Rather than a set of master-slave relationships, it is more like a central database (R/W) and multiple remote databases (also R/W).
- I won't know how many remote databases I have until they are created. And the central DB won't know that a database exists until data arrives from it. (To me, this implies I cannot use the method of giving each its own unique identity range to guarantee uniqueness in the central database.)
It appears to me that the bottom line is that I don't want "replication" so much as I want "awareness". I want the central database to know what happened in the remote databases, but there is no time requirement. I want the remote databases to be aware of the central database, but they don't need to know about each other.
WTH is my question? It is this: Does this scenario sound like any of the typical replication scenarios, or does it sound like I have to roll my own? Perhaps #7 above is the only one that matters, and given that requirement, out-of-the-box replication is impossible.
EDIT: I realize that this question might be more suited to ServerFault. I also searched there and found no answers to my questions. And based on the replication questions I did find both on SO and SF, it seemed that the decision was 50-50 over where to put my question. Sorry if I guessed wrong.