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There are some companies that offer bidirectional data replication. While they may work for your implementation, I would be careful. There are several potential obstacles toward successfully implementing this technology:
- Opportunities for data inconsistency -- are there periods when the data is being merged together where it is corrupt? What happens if the system goes down during a reconciliation?
- Performance impact -- what will the impact be to my production systems?
- Scalability issues -- how much data can it replicate? What if I need to send more than that?
- Does the tool replicate the kind of data you want it to -- some only replicate file system data, not databases.
- What happens when two people modify the same record at the same time?
- Are there periods when I'd get different replies to the same query, depending on my location?
- Cost -- this is a fairly specialized need and you'll likely wind up paying more for it than you would for a more traditional technology.
While it is certainly possible that some product on the market has conquered these obstacles, I'd be very careful in my evaluation of them.
I believe that a better and simpler solution would be to have networked access to a single instance of a centralized database and send all updates to that instance. Then, replicate the database using more conventional and mature replication tools to the remote site.
I think you'll be happier with that solution in the long run.
Evan L. Marcus
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