What do a data warehouse, a corporate intranet, and a sales force automation application have in common? Aside from relying on a database for their storage requirements, all three of these application types must move data quickly and reliably throughout an organization. For example, a data warehouse receives sales data from an order processing system; a corporate intranet application moves financial data from a site in New York to a site in Japan; and a sales force automation system replicates customer information to the laptop computer of a local sales representative.
Today, more and more business applications are being designed to run in distributed computing environments. In addition to distributing applications across a network of workstations, servers, and legacy mainframe systems, organizations are distributing applications from centralized corporate offices to regional and satellite offices, and increasingly, to mobile offices (employee laptop computers).
Distributed office locations and personnel demand 24-hour operations and elaborate tracking systems, along with higher data integrity requirements. Aggravating the issue, most organizations have acquired a mix of disparate networks and computing platforms. The ensuing challenge for today's administrator is determining the best way to distribute large amounts of data across heterogeneous systems in a timely fashion.
SQL Server enables customers to replicate data from one SQL Server database to others throughout the enterprise. SQL Server 7.0 replication goals include:
Providing a full range of scalable replication solutions to meet the complete spectrum of application requirements.
Helping to lower the cost and complexity of replicated environments by making replication easier to build, manage, and use.
Enabling bidirectional replication capabilities to heterogeneous data sources and easy integration with third-party applications.