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REPLICATION, THE NEXT GENERATION OF DISTRIBUTED DATABASE TECHNOLOGY
Source: George Schussel research paper Published: Jun 1994
This is a major research paper by George Schussel on the technique of replication as a method for supporting distribution of data to multiple sites. Some comments from the introduction to that paper follow:
Replication, or the copying of data in databases to multiple locations to support distributed applications, is an important new tool for businesses in building competitive service advantages. New replicator facilities from several vendors are making this technology much more useful and practical than it’s been in the past. In this article we will go into enough detail on replication for the reader to understand the importance of replication, its benefits and some of the related technical issues.
Buying trends today clearly indicate that companies want their applications to be open and distributed closer to the line of business. This means that databases supporting those companies have to migrate to this same open, distributed world. As distributed operational applications become more widely used across large enterprises there is going to be a requirement for increasing numbers of data copies to support timely local response. This is because the propagation uncertainties and costs associated with real time networks and/or distributed DBMS solutions are a headache to deal with.
Replication provides users with their own local copies of data. These local, updatable data copies can support increased localized processing, reduced network traffic, easy scalability and cheaper approaches for distributed, non-stop processing.
While replication or data copying can clearly provide users with local and therefore much quicker access to data, the challenge is to provide these copies to users so that the overall systems operate with the same integrity and management capacity that is available with a monolithic, central model. For example, if the same inventory records exist on two different systems in two different locations, say New York and Chicago, the system needs to insure that the same product isn’t sold to two separate customers. Replication is the best current solution for many applications
