So how do you access data from the production database without affecting database performance?

Expensive hardware upgrades or maintaining several databases exclusively for reporting and analytics may seem like good ideas. But these approaches only increase the cost of doing business. You need a more affordable, impact-free approach to access business-critical data.

You need to offload reporting and analytics

By offloading reporting and analytics, you can easily and affordably tap into the full potential of your data – without sacrificing database performance. You can use data replication for offloading reporting to a separate system, without purchasing and maintaining dedicated databases just for analytics. This technique allows you to split online transaction processing and database reporting to a data warehouse instance that is constantly maintained to reflect the activity on the production system. That means business users and data scientists can analyze and report on accurate, real-time data without creating database contention. This approach also helps with a number of additional scenarios.

Data replication supports a variety of use cases for reporting.

Centralized reporting

Do your remote users have trouble accessing centralized data? Instead of having them log on to the already taxed production system to run queries, reports and analytics, you can replicate the data to a database system of their choosing. They can then perform local queries to access the data they need. This offloads query processing and accelerates data access.

Data distribution

You can increase flexibility by replicating some tables to a single target location, while replicating other tables and sequences to other target systems. This scalable approach supports target systems in different locations.

Cascading

With data replication, you can distribute departments across different systems to improve online transaction processing and reporting. This approach also supports multiple systems updating the same tables. If a conflict is detected, it invokes a user-defined conflict resolution routine.

How can SharePlex® help?

Improve database performance on your production system. Offload reporting from your production system to your destination system to ensure high availability and accelerate database reporting.

Run reports with fresh data during regular business hours. With SharePlex, you don’t have to wait for less busy windows to generate large reports.

Create an always-in-sync copy of your transactional data. Perform billing and reporting on a second server easily and affordably.

Make advanced real-time analytics a reality. Gain a competitive advantage with advanced analytics, without impacting critical applications. Accommodate complex reporting and archiving processes.

Implement load balancing. This improves database performance, optimizes your reporting environment and improves OLTP performance.

Ensure data accuracy. Take advantage of built-in monitoring, conflict resolution and data comparison and synchronization capabilities to ensure data accuracy in flight. All with no performance lags.

Replicate and integrate data in near real time. Get real-time data integration and warehousing with access to change history and metadata.

Who’s responsible for high availability?

As a member of your organization’s technology team, you understand the challenges of keeping things running continuously and smoothly. But, not all aspects of maintaining high availability will be under your immediate control. Complex environments consist of storage, server clusters, load balancers, memory and more. Each requires tuning and optimization to run at peak performance under daily and peak loads. Your network professionals and system architects are largely responsible for ensuring your infrastructure is designed for HA.

But, as a DBA, your organization depends on you to maintain high database availability. You can’t afford unscheduled downtime that could result in loss of service, loss of data, loss of money and loss of customers. You need any edge that will help you meet or exceed your SLAs and your role is made more complicated by the presence of multiple databases and platforms, each of which has its own set of demands.

How can SharePlex help?

Conquer downtime. With SharePlex, you can eliminate the downtime normally associated with migrations and upgrades by replicating your production data to a separate server. You can keep business and transactions humming in the secondary environment while you perform the installation, testing and verification on the main instance.

Enable rapid failover. HA relies on databases that can immediately take over for each other if one has failed. Replication and synchronization with SharePlex, along with automatic failover, ensure that redundant databases are always standing by and ready at a moment’s notice with the most current data.

Combine with disaster recovery goals. The asynchronous replication model used by SharePlex can also help you meet your disaster recovery objectives. With replication and reconciliation, your critical, real-time applications don’t have to wait for an entire disaster recovery database copy to be spun up, and you won’t lose transactions. If you’re already using SharePlex for a high availability solution, you could use the same target database for disaster recovery, and avoid the extra complexities and costs of separate solutions.

Support analytics and reporting. You can also use SharePlex to offload reporting from your production system to your destination system to ensure high availability and accelerate reporting. SharePlex makes it easy to maximize the value of your data without sacrificing database performance.

Modernize your database environment without risk

There’s an important difference between a database upgrade and a database migration, and that difference is your data. Upgrading transforms an existing database environment into a new release environment. The data itself is not directly affected during an upgrade.

A database migration refers to moving data from a source database to a separate destination database, such as when you move your database environment to new hardware, a new operating system or a new platform, like the cloud.

However, both database migrations and database upgrades have the potential to wreak havoc on database availability if something goes wrong during the process. That’s why Fortune 500 companies rely on SharePlex to meet their database operational goals without any downtime, data loss or business interruption.

Database upgrades without maintenance windows

Staying current with database versions is desirable to receive the latest functionality, bug fixes and security patches. Databases are highly vulnerable to cyber attacks, yet many organizations put off upgrades because the process can be difficult, time-consuming and error-prone.

If you rely on native tools to perform your database upgrade, you must accept that these tools require a maintenance window, as the database upgrade inherently prevents the database from operating. There’s also a risk that the upgrade will fail, and DBAs have often spent nights, weekends and holidays upgrading a database only to have to roll it back the following Monday. This is bad for users, bad for business and certainly bad for the database team.

What if you could quickly and safely replicate your data to a new, upgraded database instance without any impact to critical business functions? You could perform verification and testing for as long as needed to ensure the upgrade is working properly, and then switch over when the time comes.

Database migrations without downtime or data loss

Every database migration brings its own set of challenges because it involves changing the infrastructure of the database – such as the hardware or operating system. Of course, changing the hardware can also mean moving from on-premises to the cloud. Migrations require ensuring that the entire application stack operates properly in the new environment, without any performance degradation.

If you’re using native database migration tools, that’s no easy task. You’re also risking downtime and lost data. No wonder 90 percent of DBAs cite database migrations as their most stressful responsibility. Thankfully, SharePlex changes that.

With SharePlex, you can eliminate all the stress and risk you may have been anticipating with your next database migration. That’s because SharePlex includes the superior functionality you need to safely move data to on-premises and cloud databases, at a fraction of the cost of native tools.

How can SharePlex help?

In-flight data accuracy. Detects data anomalies through built-in, before-and-after image data comparisons at the transaction level. This enforces data integrity and ensures the replica copy is guaranteed accurate.

Compare-and-repair. Eliminates downtime associated with taking applications offline when data is compromised. By making repairs in line, SharePlex saves time and mitigates risk.

Database migration failback. Provides a migration-rollback recovery mechanism to replicate from a newer version of Oracle back to an older version. This safeguards your data if the application does not work correctly after the database migration, regardless of how much work users have done since the migration. It enables failback to the older version with no loss of user data.

24x7x365 support. Offers peace of mind, knowing you’re backed by a team of award-winning database migration and upgrade experts.