Replication

Has data ever been placed on different servers throughout your business? How was that data transferred from one source to another in a safe, efficient, and reliable manner? Now, imagine that you have two production sites located across the world from each other: How are they going to collaborate and share information? Many corporations distribute information from remote sales locations to central order processing locations. Other organizations operate distributed warehouses, with each individual location needing knowledge of the others' inventories. The problems are many. One of the potential solutions is the implementation of a replication strategy.

Replication is the process of carrying, modifying, and distributing data and database objects (stored procedures, extended properties, views, tables, user -defined functions, triggers, and indexes) from one source server to another, in a consistent fashion, independent of location. Replication is a huge topic. Any implementation can use multiple types and an endless number of forms. The following section describes just why replication is implemented.