Some people might tell you that the statistics you see on your television screens of live sports telecasts are recorded by actual reporters at the sports events as the games are being played. Let me tell you something! Those people haven’t the faintest idea of what they are talking about! The truth is that there are gremlins, which live in your television and they are the ones that go about updating that scoreboard as you continue to watch the game (seriously!). It is
the truth and it is has worked wonders in eradicating the gremlin unemployment problem (when was the last time you saw an unemployed gremlin?).
As ludicrous as the idea of reporters at sports events is, it is still an example of remote data access by staff that is working on the road. This access could also be extended to other offices of the same organization, sister organizations or even the general public. Just as there are many different groups of people that may want to gain access to the data, there are also many ways to achieve remote access. If you would like to learn more about them and the advantages/disadvantages of each method, click here. However, for the scope of this article, we will concentrate on ‘Replication’ as a method of remote access.
‘Replication’ is defined as the ‘process of creating multiple copies of data to be used at locations that are either on the same server or different servers connected by LANs, WANs, or the Internet’. These ‘multiple copies of data’ are also called ‘replicas’ and they allow multiple users to work on their own copy and eventually synchronize the changes they have made with the ‘source database’. Going back to the example, imagine a reporter who is at a game and recording the various statistics for a sports network or website. He or she might update the local replica that they have and connect to the company network later on to update or ‘synchronize’ the changes as the game progressed. Since the work is done locally, it could be extremely beneficial in other scenarios that are far more processor-intensive and so would reduce network traffic. In fact, users could continue to work in the event of the entire network going down. Furthermore, the changes made would also be dispersed to the all other replicas in a distributed system fashion, which would also mean that you would have up-to-date backups on other computers.
Now replication is a great idea especially since businesses are becoming more geographically dispersed. Mind you, before you rush out and go get a tattoo saying ‘replication for life’, you really ought to consider the situations in which replication may be less that ideal. Click here for more info.
In the event that you use more than one database management system or DBMS (MS SQL Server, Oracle and so forth), you may consider a replication package. The reason for this is because, whilst the major database products have replication as a feature, none of them replicate well with other vendor’s databases. However, you may be required to make system changes or you may even continue to encounter compatibility issues. For a listing of available products, click here DataReplicationBuyersGuide.pdf
For now though, let us just look at the different ways of implementing replication. The links here are either a step-by-step guide to setting up replication for your own database or a general FAQ for the different DBMS (and random links).
Using the Briefcase Accessory in Win95 and WinNT, click here
Using MS SQL Server, click here
Using MS Access 2000 (download), click here
The Oracle Replication FAQ, click here
Using JRO, click here
Well, hopefully those links will help you gain a better understanding of replication and provide you with information specific to your DBMS. Anyways, to recap, replication is simply a means of sharing data between databases in different locations. The user works on their replica before synching it with the original in the main database. Well that is all I have to say about replication, so if you will excuse me the Gremlins and a tad bit hungry so we are going to go grab something to eat (literally, in the gremlins case!). Hope you enjoyed the article! Until next time!
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