Introduction

In this chapter, information on how the Streams technology is put to use for database replication will be presented. There is no doubt that database replication, is the main beneficiary of the Streams technology. With the Streams technology, database replication became much more administratively simple and flexible. The impact of the replication process on the source database, when used with Streams technology, is quite minimal.

This chapter covers the basic methods and features of the Streams replication process. It highlights various issues related to the replication process such as the instantiation of objects, conflict detection, multi-way replication, supplemental logging, principles of the system change number, session tags, and downstream capture.

Database Changes

The database replication process is a method of keeping a copy of data at a remote location. In other words the primary or source data and the dependent remote secondary data is kept synchronized by a continuous data flow method. Any changes made at the source database are copied to the remote database system.  This keeps the tables and the data synchronized. The source database system and the destination database system are peer systems and exist independently.