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 MySQL. I would like a volunteer to coordinate the fund-raising for me. It should be trivial, but I don’t want to do it myself, for several reasons. I can publicize the bounty on this blog and the project mailing list, and contact some of the corporations that have asked me for features. I doubt it will be hard to raise the money.
I’m not committing to this, just proposing it, though I did run it by my employer, who is very supportive. Here’s the list of features I propose to implement:
- Writing a test suite
- Bi-directional syncing
- Syncing many tables
- Syncing tables without a primary key
- Providing useful exit codes and more informational output
- Syncing in chunks
- Checking privileges before syncing
- Syncing based on pre-computed checksums
- Automatically choosing sensible parameters based on table structure
- Making default locking and other behaviors smarter
Alternatively, if someone wants to do it and just contribute the code to the project, I’d be delighted. I doubt that will happen, though, and there’d still be a lot of work in it for me, so I think it’s probably more realistic that I will do it.
Technorati Tags:mysql, replication, sql, sync, synchronization
I think $2500 is cheap, but if you stipulate that it’s a bounty and not fee for service, and that you retain all ownership, I think it’s reasonable.
I use your tools and support your efforts. I’d be happy to contribute toward this bounty (and I would try to persuade my empoyer to do the same).
Have you seen bountyup.com yet?
Bountyup sounds like what I was trying to find, but couldn’t get the right search keywords for.
Thanks Dane, Sheeri, and people who’ve emailed me. This will probably work out fine, based on the feedback I’ve gotten so far. I’ll go forward with this and post more details later.
Love the tools. We would love to cover a large portion of your expenses here. Contact me when you are ready!
Thanks Jeff,
I’m supposedly on a brief vacation right now, will be back in a few days and post/email further.
Hey guys,
I’m with BountyUp and the site popped up on my news feed. If you all can help define what the explicit success metrics for the Bounty are. (ownership, criteria it must fulfill, etc.) then I can go ahead and post it for you on our software or open source meta site software.bountyup.com or opensource.bountyup.com. Please let me know if I can answer questions about the site or help you in any way.
Thanks Todd. Some generous companies actually just contributed the bounty in a few fell swoops. But I’m glad I know about BountyUp now anyway. It might come in handy!
You got it Xaprb! Please let me know if I can do anything to help you out in the future.