Replication Server offers guaranteed delivery and data protection
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use SAP Rep Server to create a warm standby read only copy of our data to be used for reporting and other decision support type activities. It is used within our department and is not an enterprise solution. The Enterprise solution that is recommended is Oracle's Golden Gate. We use Replication Server because it offers guaranteed delivery and transactional consistency. It also offers low latency so we can run critical jobs against the warm standby copy knowing that copy is only ever a few seconds behind the transactional copy.
Pros
- guaranteed delivery
- high availability
- scalable
- low latency
- data transformation
Cons
- make implementation easier
- make programming easier
- offer out of the box pre-defined use cases
Likelihood to Recommend
Rep Server is great for creating a warm standby server and backup copies of data. What is great about replication server is it is replicating transactions, not disk blocks. So transactions are also consistent and no corruption is ever replicated. I have not found a situation where Rep Server can't handle what we're asking for, however, at times it can be difficult to program. Doing data transformations can be a little tricky and you need very knowledgeable DBAs and Developers that understand the product. Rep Server uses a publish and subscribe model and can do cross platform data migrations.