New Idea for sharing database : Replicate the DB

[cleck673]

I have been trying for months to get my two sites mergered into one database, yet keep the sites separate in some areas.

I have one site that has 150,000 members and about 1.2million posts. This site uses vBadvanced as its front end.

I have another site with 35,000 members and it also uses vBadvanced, but I have a couple minor intergration hacks to make the frontpage news a blog software's engine pulled in as a center block into vBadvanced.

The Goal
Share both of these sites forums into one but leaving the rest of the site items separate.

The Issues
These are the issues I can think of so far...

• Setting Template for the domains
• Cookies
• 2 versions of vbadvanced pulling data from different forums

The Question
An idea my server guy came up with was using some built in mySQL function that allows you to autosync tables of seperate databases together.

So, with this idea, he is thinking of leaving the databases seperate as well as the complete installs. It would work like 2 totally seperate installs. What is different is that the user and post tables (as well as all the others that would be needed to pull this off) are replicated and kept in sync with the other. So both sites, while still separate, have the same data in certain tables.

Hopefully this will work. Does anyone have any suggestions, comments, etc?

Some other reading from previous (unanswered) threads:

YAMDQ: Yes, another 2 sites, 2 forums with a shared database question
2 Sites, 2 Domains, 1 Forum DB shared - and upgrades (paid service request, resulted in getting someone that bailed on it)
2 forums merged into one, but....