Is Replication The Answer?

  • I'm a developer in the Hospitality Industry. I'm trying to figure out the best way to move data from our hotels to a central loaction. We have LOTS of legacy code out there that build's propietary export files, FTP's those to our data center where serveral (outdated) importers get the data into our SQL Server db's. Right now, we only move the data in one direction from the hotel to the data center, but of course, we'd like to be able to go the other direction as well, and push data from the data center to the hotels (you folks thinking "centralized rate management" get a prize!). 80%-90% of the data we want to move is for reporting purposes. Not really looking for a lot of "near real time" data.

    Our biggest customer has well over 100 hotels. The good news is that this customer has a WAN/VPN infrastructure we can use to move data around, BUT we have other customers (hopefully more to come) as well that don't have VPN's, so I'd like a solution that meets both needs. It seems to me that whatever solution we come up with probably needs to happen over http/https.

    I've been studying replication, it SEEMS like a pretty good solution, but I am more than a little concerned about using replication over HTTP/HTTPS seems to be somewhat uncharted territory. As I'm sure you all know there are lots of other ways to do this, web services seem like a good alternative as well.

    Any thoughts out there would be appreciated! Case studies maybe?

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  • Holy cow! Not one response! Not one person even interested in telling me I'm in the wrong forum, or this sort of question doesn't belong here, or I'm a bad driver. 😉

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  • If you want Bi directional updates, then you should look at Merge replication. Replication can work with FTP. If you are connected over VPN, then it makes it easier. You should have tcp port 1433 and UDP port 1434 open. UDP port can be closed once the replication is set.

    Your other option would be to use your business layer to notify (Actually push) to all the servers. That will e a home grown replication

    -Roy

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