[support] Why does drush sql-sync save db different from drush sql-dump

[Andy Heath]

I'm new to drupal, drush and git, not had much sql exposure for 20 years 
but experienced in unix systems and all the usual software technologies. 
Please tell me nicely if I posted in the wrong place where I should have 
posted it.

I'm setting a drupal site up so I can post offline to a virtual machine 
on my laptop, track my development in git (fabulous tool, well done 
Linus). This I have working fine on several vm instances and my remote 
server.  However, as I'd like the database backed in a git repo I was 
playing with ways to do that in combination with drush sql-sync and 
drush sql-dump when I  noticed that the database that drush sql-sync 
produces (located with %dump in a drush alias) has differences to the 
one produced by drush sql-dump --result-file=..). That is, if I sql-sync 
from another machine and I then sql-dump the database into a file its 
not the same as the one that was dumped during the sync.

Why ?

Further to this I'm trying to figure out a scheme where I know there is 
a copy of the current database with a known name inside the git scope 
but its a little tricky if the commands to dump produce different 
results to the ones produced by sql-sync.  I'm beginning to feel these 
sql database results are non-deterministic :-). Maybe they are ;-) (note 
on each machine there is only *one* database for drupal)

andy

Cheers

andy