Database Replication

A leader in training of licensed professionals in the financial services industry for over 25 years, this company has helped more than half a million professionals shape their future. Their exceptionally high first-time pass rates and their commitment to excellence have earned them a reputation for dependability among their 3,500 corporate clients worldwide.

As an industry leader, this client saw the value of offering web-based training and testing to their customers. However, to provide customers with on-line services, they must update and maintain students' records in their high-transaction environment.

They had been backing-up both the database and the transaction log daily, but they had not been replicating the database. They had a point-in-time recovery gap of twelve hours -- during which time many transactions would occur. Therefore, they lacked the ability to effectively recover from a disaster -- which had become so critical to their customers.

In early June 2002, their customers demanded that they mitigate this risk within three months. So, they began to co-locate data storage and replicate the database with their own technical staff whose experience had been limited to network infrastructure.

As the deadline approached replication and restoration of data were still obstacles they had not overcome -- they knew the project wouldn't be completed on time.

It became apparent that they needed to augment their internal staff with database expertise for high-transaction, web-based applications. Solution

Peart-Hannon recommended a three-pronged solution. One, on-line transactions to the primary and secondary databases transactions should be backed-up every hour eliminating the twelve-hour gap. Two, both sites should be able to operate autonomously; assuring users at one site are not affected by outages at another site. Three, logical data partitioning and merge replication would be used to keep the two systems in sync allowing either site to be updated and loss of either site would cause minimal interruption to users.

Peart-Hannon assessed the client's technical configuration in relation to their business requirements, application processes and the project objectives. Peart-Hannon then designed and implemented three approaches to achieve the solution recommendations. First, Peart-Hannon streamlined database mirroring by setting up merge replication and logically partitioning the data. Second, Peart-Hannon assured that updates to both primary and secondary databases occur automatically and accurately when sites operate autonomously due to an outage elsewhere. Third, Peart-Hannon implemented merger replication and backup plans on both systems which allow recovery and re-sync from either system -- preventing human error from delaying recovery.

Peart-Hannon delivered in two weeks what their client had been struggling with for nearly three months. Peart-Hannon's client met their obligation to their training customers who continue to expand their use of the client's web-based training and testing services.