So what is replication? It can be many forms. Some common technologies include:

  1. Oracle Goldengate
  2. Oracle Advanced Streams
  3. Oracle Advanced Replication
  4. Oracle Dataguard logical standby
  5. Microsoft Transactional Replication
  6. Microsoft Merge Replication
  7. Shareplex
  8. Sterling Commerce Connect:Direct

And now?

dbInternals Row Level Replication

All of these other examples except Connect:Direct are database replication products, and work in a similar fashion:

  1. Capture – at the source database, new transactions are captured for replicated tables. This might be through redo log mining, database triggers/stored procedures or other similar methods
  2. Transfer – captured records are sent over the network through various methods (database links, trail files, etc)
  3. Apply – at the destination database, transferred records are applied to it.

So what makes dbInternals’ Row Level Replication different? It is in the name – row level replication. In other systems tables are replicated and that can lead to conflicts, requiring complex conflict resolution schemes. In Row Level Replication, ownership of rows is established before they are inserted and can easily used to determine the correct version of a row. Thus, you can mix and match rows in the same table from different databases, and you will always know what database has the correct version of the row. There is no traditional conflict resolution in Row Level replication. Instead Row Level Replication has processes for resyncing replication, reapplying rows for a given range to all replicated databases.