What is Replication?

According to Webster’s Online, the definition we mean is: 3 a : COPY, REPRODUCTION b : the action or process of reproducing

Replication is simply copying data from one database to another. This could be a subset of the data or a complete copy.

I’m going to use insert for my examples but any DML can be replicated.

If you create an insert trigger on a table and push data across a database link every time a record gets inserted, you’ve performed replication. Call that the poor man’s SYNCHRONOUS replication.

I had the opportunity to spend a day in a seminar with Ralph Kimball. If you don’t know who that is, he is a guru of data warehousing. If you’re involved in data warehouses, I hope you are at least familiar with his work. Currently in the industry there are two primary, competing warehousing methodologies, i.e. practically religions to some, Kimball vs. Inmon. I think that’s kind of silly. A methodology is like a hammer or a drill; choose the best one for the job. If I absolutely have to pick, I’m in the Kimball camp.

Welcome to my blog. My name is Lewis R Cunningham and I’m an Oracle geek. I love playing with Oracle, working with Oracle and sharing what I know about Oracle. In my travels as a consultant and employee, I have found that, in the Oracle world at least, managers, project leads, etc. often have to make decisions regarding their projects, employees and day to day operations with very little, and/or erroneous, information. These decisions often negatively impact the business bottom line and ongoing projects. The lack of information can be caused by an incomplete team, a lack of communication inside the team or even ego or attitude problems.

My goal with this blog will be to remove some of the mystery surrounding Oracle technology and to describe ways to integrate that technology in various projects and business areas.

I know I said “A day with Ralph Kimball, Part 2″ would be next but I wanted to get this tech note out there while it was fresh in my mind. I’ll post items like this periodically as they occur to me to do so.

I upgraded our Oracle Designer repository from 9i to 10g. It looks like the little things that annoyed me in 9i will continue to do so in 10g, at least in the short term. I don’t see any dramatic changes and my problem child ERD still can’t be transformed to tables.