| Microsoft Office 2000/Visual Basic Programmer's Guide | |
Imagine that a client has asked you to develop a contact-management solution that the company's field sales staff can use to monitor sales and orders. Each sales representative has a laptop computer that can be connected to the company's network.
A traditional approach to building this solution is to separate the tables from the other objects in the database so that the data can reside in a back-end database on a network server, or on the Internet or an intranet, while the queries, forms, reports, macros, and modules reside in a separate front-end database on the user's computer. The objects in the front-end database are based on tables that are linked to the back-end database. When sales representatives want to retrieve or update information in the database, they use the front-end database.
Database replication enables you to take a new approach to building this solution by creating a single database that contains both the data and objects, and then making replicas of the database for each sales representative. You can make replicas for each user and synchronize each replica with the Design Master on a network server. Sales representatives update the replicas on their computers during the course of a work session, and users synchronize their replicas with the Design Master on the server as needed.
In addition, you can choose to replicate only a portion of the data in the Design Master, and you can replicate different portions for different users by creating partial replicas. In the scenario involving sales representatives who use replica databases, each individual salesperson typically needs only the sales data related to his or her own territory. Replicating all sales data for all sales representatives would involve unnecessary processing and duplication of data. By using partial replicas, you can duplicate only the data that each salesperson actually needs. A complete set of data is still contained in the Design Master, but each replica handles only a subset of that data.