Data consolidation and distribution with SharePlex database replication Written by Sujith Kumar, Chief Technologist Executive summary In today s fast-paced mobile age, data continues to accrue by leaps and bounds. To support strategic, operational and tactical business decisions, organizations need effective data management that enables them to both consolidate data from multiple sources and distribute data to multiple targets in real time. For example, a department store chain could consolidate and analyze sales data from geographically dispersed stores to provide valuable insight for inventory management, and it could use data distribution to send selective data updates based on demographics to individual stores in order to increase sales. Of course, adding these data consolidation and distribution capabilities should not impose a financial burden on enterprises or a strain on IT organizations. The key is to enable enterprises to distribute or consolidate data cheaply and efficiently, while making it easy for IT departments to implement and manage the systems. SharePlex delivers robust, efficient, high-speed and low-latency data replication that enables the real-time data distribution and consolidation organizations need today. About SharePlex SharePlex is a highly advanced, log-based Oracle database replication product used by customers worldwide for a range of needs, including real-time data access, data archiving, high availability, migrations and regulatory compliance. Fifteen years of technological evolution have molded SharePlex into a mature, robust, scalable, high-performance product. It is the only true log-based replication tool on the market, and it is platform-independent, supporting all the major operating systems, including HP-UX, IBM AIX, Microsoft Windows, Linux and Solaris. SharePlex supports Oracle Enterprise and Standard Editions, including replication between different versions of Oracle, near real-time integration to other database systems like Hadoop and Sybase, and change data capture to JMS Queue and files for further data delivery to other database systems.
SharePlex enables effective data management, allowing organizations to consolidate data from multiple sources and distribute it to multiple targets in real time. SharePlex replicates thousands of transactional database operations per second from one source database to one or more target databases, ensuring a continuously available database refreshed with real-time data all with minimal overhead and extremely low latency. SharePlex is capable of capturing, filtering, transforming and routing all the DML (Data Manipulation Language) and object-level DDL (Data Definition Language) operations from one database to another while guaranteeing transaction consistency. It continuously captures the logical changes made to the source database and ensures data integrity in the target database(s) with built-in features, such as, quick-check and compare and repair for verifying data integrity. It even comes with its own web-based monitoring and management tool, SharePlex Manager. SharePlex is architected to be highly fault-tolerant, making it invulnerable to network outages, host system failures, and operating system and database crashes. This is accomplished by multi-process check pointing and intermediate self-managing holding areas called files. SharePlex s unique architecture allows it to run natively on the database servers with negligible impact on database workload performance and consume minimal operating system resources. SharePlex is usually installed and instantiated on both source and target database servers. Once SharePlex is operational, it spawns capture, read and export processes on the source database server, and import and post processes on the target database server. The capture process scans the Oracle redo logs for any changes to the data and captures the changes. (If necessary, the capture process can scan the archive logs instead of the online redo logs.) The read process prepares the data to be transported across the network after processing it and hands it over to the export process. The export process transports the data to one or more target database servers via TCP/IP across the LAN or WAN. On the target Oracle database server(s), the import process intercepts the TCP/IP packets, processes the data received from the source database server, and hands it over to the post process. The post process constructs SQL statements for the DML operations based on the data changes observed on the source database and executes them by connecting to the target database(s). SharePlex can encrypt and compress the data while it is being transported across the network, which enhances both security and performance. Export Export Import SQL Read Redo/archive logs Source Capture Capture Cloud target Target Figure 1. SharePlex Oracle-to-Oracle replication architecture, on-premises, remote, or in-the-cloud 2
Data consolidation Enterprises are faced with an explosion of data from multiple applications, departments and domains across the enterprise, and even from business units or departments spread around the globe. All too often, that data comes in a variety of formats that lack interoperability. Data consolidation enables enterprises to establish a central database that can store data in an application-neutral format for use by employees worldwide. Organizations can also consolidate data from multiple geographically dispersed satellite databases into a central database or repository that can be used for realtime reporting, business intelligence and business analytics. For example, A well-known online meeting hosting company uses SharePlex to consolidate data so customer billing information can be accessed from one database. In addition, data consolidation can help organizations improve efficiency and reduce IT costs. Databases are a major component of the operational IT budget, requiring both staff (database administrators or system administrators) and hardware (such as database servers and storage). Data consolidation offers additional important benefits, including the following: Reduction in total cost of ownership by increasing database server utilization Enhanced availability, data security and compliance with company policies Improved application performance and data visibility Centralized data backup and archiving Better globalization of data With SharePlex, you can replicate data from multiple databases to a single database in a hub-and-spoke configuration, with no limit to the number of source databases. The versatility of SharePlex allows replication of entire tables and/or selected columns or rows within a table to the hub or central database. In addition, the data being replicated can also be transformed en-route prior to being applied to the central database. Data distribution In an age where businesses are trying to find new ways to reach customers and customers crave instant gratification, having data available locally in real time can have a huge impact on revenue. Hence the need for data distribution it s all about getting the right data into the hands of the right users, in the right place, at the right time. Distributed database architecture typically consists of a single publisher and multiple subscribers. Data is collected in a holistically normalized manner in a central database and is selectively de-normalized and distributed in real time to multiple target databases that may be geographically dispersed. The distribution of data results in improved performance and availability at the local sites. For example, a major U.S.-based cellular phone company uses SharePlex to replicate user account and profile data from a central database to multiple satellite databases or subscribers located in different data centers. This allows users and vendors to access A well-known online meeting hosting company based in California uses SharePlex to consolidate data from multiple databases located in different data centers across North America so that customer billing information can be accessed from one database. 3
localized data, resulting in improved availability and performance and also enabling the company to target its marketing campaigns based on the customer demographics. Data distribution provides additional key benefits as it: Enables localization or compartmentalization of data Simplifies growth or expansion due to targeted data distribution Minimizes IT infrastructure requirements Improves reliability and performance through data localization Mitigates risk of data breaches since the data is highly compartmentalized You can also configure SharePlex to replicate data from target databases or subscribers to further distribute data, in what we call cascading to intermediary systems. It can send targeted data to each subscriber. Once the data is selectively provisioned and sent to each subscriber, any new updates to the central database are selectively sent to all the subscribers in real time. SharePlex is capable of instantiating new subscribers or refreshing existing subscribers in case of failures without any impact on the central database. Conclusion SharePlex is a single replication product that supports multiple requirements, including data consolidation and distribution. A highly scalable, faulttolerant architecture makes SharePlex a perfect choice for today s data management needs. You can configure SharePlex to replicate data from a single central database or publisher to multiple target databases or subscribers at the lowest possible cost. 4
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