The demand of users is always tough and challenging and many customers are seeking for the data in their systems for operations (CRM, ERP, POS, etc) to be used for real-time analytics or for other applications.
Someone may argue that this problem could be answered by API or Message Queue but involving programming effort. We would like to share several real cases by applying “Change Data Capture (CDC)” technology for real-time applications.
To take an example, there is a fortune 500 insurance corporation willing to use the data stored in the transaction system at AS400. It is not feasible for any other application access to their core insurance system. Thus, it is better to replicate their AS400 data to another database for further processing like real-time monitoring, data analytics, sharing data with government agencies, etc. For all those applications, they would like to have the data within 5 minutes delay.
For IBM Data Replication (CDC) solutions, it is reading database log with an agent by the minimal resource consumption at the source. Then, it will apply the changes at the target agent in a near real-time basis. With many cases, it is talking about within 30-40 seconds across the VPN between 2 sites in different regions of the world for a production environment. Meanwhile, there are still lots of replication tools needed the database administrator to prepare new triggers dedicated for the data synchronization needs. It is very costly to introduce new demand for system resources.
However, there are lots of possible accidents during the data replication. In order to prevent lost of data, IBM Data Replication allows customized Java programs developed by IBM SDK and this is a free-of-charge solutions. At this point, you may think that you may not able to program it. Nevertheless, there are lots of ready-to-use templates for reference.
In the Hong Kong market, we are the first technical team able to replicate data from AS400 data source to IBM DB2 Warehouse on cloud with one of the largest local apparels manufacturing company in Hong Kong. Also, the above real example is a Fortune 500 insurance corporations. We do have extensive application examples in the insurance and logistic industry in the APAC region.
For the data replication, it is not only supporting common data sources like IBM DB2, Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase, etc. but also big data sources like Apache Hadoop.
Please contact us for a free consultation to tailor your real-time data solution.
