Offload Reporting

Up-to-date and efficient reporting is a critical requirement for businesses to make the most of their data, however running reports is a hardware intensive activity that can impact the performance and availability of online systems.

Dbvisit REPLICATE allows organizations that use Oracle databases to easily create dedicated reporting environments. These environments remove the resource demands of reporting from the online system and allow users to create reports with their favorite report writing tools.

Using proven data replication techniques, Dbvisit Replicate creates and manages a subset of the transaction database, which can be used exclusively for reporting purposes in real time. Transactional and online systems continue to use the original database, while large, resource-hungry and time-consuming reporting jobs are run against the dedicated reporting database.

The following diagram illustrates a straightforward feed of database changes from an application database to a reporting database, using Dbvisit Replicate:

Dbvisit Replicate provides a platform that delivers cost-effective creation and operation of a reporting database. Dbvisit Replicate uses data replication to synchronize data, enabling processing to be offloaded to alternative databases and server platforms, making these databases available for ad-hoc and pre-defined reporting using a range of tools.

The benefits of using Dbvisit Replicate to maintain a dedicated reporting database include:

• Reporting data is always up-to-date.
• Reporting is always available
• Enables reporting from Oracle or MySQL, leveraging existing tools and skills
• Provide Active Data Guard functionality for Oracle Standard Edition
• Column exclusion to ensure unnecessary data items are not replicated
• Dedicated reporting platform reduces potential for impact on the online processing systems
• Dedicated reporting hardware can prevent the need for costly upgrades to the online system’s hardware
• Cost-effective – reporting can be offloaded to commodity hardware and operating systems
• Reporting database can be tuned specifically for the purpose of reporting while the online database can be tuned for online transactional access
• Requires no changes to the source data

Why have a Reporting Database

Modern organizations place a wide range of demands on the solutions they run, from around-the-clock access to data across the enterprise, to advanced reporting requirements. This combination can place significant demands on database servers and the databases they manage.

A tool like Dbvisit Replicate uses data replication across multiple servers to spread the load and widen the availability of data. It also allows each of the accessing applications, including reporting tools, to connect to a copy of the data that is tailored to their usage. Each automatically maintained copy of the data can be tailored, from the data available, to its structure and the way it is stored (e.g. indexes, security). This allows an organization to make the same data available from multiple sources, and to tune each to the individual requirements of the application or user.