Re:Show HN: Data Diff – compare tables of any size across da...
by cryptonector on Thursday June 23, 2022 @11:32AM
(#31850553)
A naive FULL OUTER JOIN is O(N), which is not efficient, indeed.
An RDBMS could implement something like the rsync algorithm, or history tables, etc., to speed up a FULL OUTER JOIN.
The point is that FULL OUTER JOIN is the SQL table source "diff" primitive. Thus it seems natural to use that and let the RDBMS optimize it.
If you're doing in-database diffs, however, a join-based approach will likely outperform data-diff though.
Ideally databases would have support a standard MERKLE TREE INDEX so we could get extremely fast comparisons.