Streams Summary

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While we haven't spent much time summarizing in previous chapters, we wanted to provide some parting news here. Streams is an extremely large and complex technology set that can be configured to serve innumerable purposes in your enterprise. Its primary use is as an events management system-it is for controlling the lifespan of events in a publish/subscribe model. Due to its architecture, it provides an extremely powerful engine for configuring a replicated database across a distributed environment. Because of this replication functionality, there exists the ability to utilize Streams replication as a high-availability partner for disaster recovery and load balancing.

Streams is complicated, however. Because it is so flexible, it has many moving parts that the database administrator must take responsibility for. It is best, usually, to consider Streams as part of the application development environment. This is because an application typically has to be Streams aware for it to work correctly. There are restrictions on datatypes, there are bandwidth issues, there are performance considerations, and data rearchitecting may be required in order to have a successful Streams implementation.

We say this not to stop you from using Streams, but to get you in the loop. Streams is extremely powerful. But it does not deploy over a weekend, or even over a week. It requires extensive planning and testing.

One final note: the Streams documentation from Oracle Corporation weighs in at over 1,000 pages, when you take the entire document set as a whole. This chapter represents less than 4 percent of that total. In other words, consider Streams the iceberg and this chapter the tip. You want to be fully informed when it comes to the concepts and administration of Streams, so make sure you get the full document set and read all of it. Or most of it. Okay, at least some of it.

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