SharePlex should be at the top of your list for replication software
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Our secondary use of Shareplex was to facilitate a major, complex database migration. It enabled us to migrate to new servers, new storage, update the OS, upgrade the database version, and apply critical patches with little (literally a few seconds) of downtime. We were able to run the old and new systems side by side and compare performance prior to the migration. It also allowed us to provide fail-back capability in the event of an issue, without data loss.
Pros
- Speed. We see little to no delay in replication streams between source and target databases.
- Tuning and options: There are a myriad of options available for tuning and customizing replication streams.
- Support: I've been consistently pleased with the support we've received from Quest. They're prompt and knowledgable and solve issues quickly and without drama.
Cons
- Documentation: There are some areas where the documentation is weak or dated. In particular, running SharePlex on RAC is a more involved process than the implementation guides would have you believe. When reaching out for assistance, the answer from Dell (a few years ago) was to engage their consulting team.
- Built in scripts/agents: SharePlex comes with a handful of monitoring and management scripts that can be run as cron jobs. Unfortunately, these scripts are primitive and rigid, requiring the user to hard-code values into the script body and limiting their usefulness when you're running multiple replication streams. Some of the methods and dependencies are heavy. We ended up writing custom scripts that do what we need but it would be helpful if there were greater functionality and flexibility out of the box.
- Compared to other tools, there is not as wide (or at least as active) a user presence. If you're having difficulties you may have to engage a consultant since it's less likely that you'll find an answer in a forum or blog post.
Likelihood to Recommend
SharePlex is suitable for heterogenous replication of one database to another. The list of targets is ever increasing, with support for all major RDBMS vendors as well as support for popular NoSQL and JSON replication.
SharePlex is effective when replicating from on-premise to cloud. Whether that's migrating data, creating a high-availability presence in a public or private cloud, or populating a data mart, it does the job quite well.
