This manual provides instructions for:
- Operating SharePlex
- Planning your replication strategy
- Preparing the environment for replication
- Configuring replication
- Starting replication
- Monitoring, tuning, and troubleshooting replication
- Failover/failback in a high-availability environment
- Performing administrative operations on replication systems
Other SharePlex documentation
For the complete SharePlex documentation set, go to https://support.quest.com/shareplex/technical-documents.
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Conventions used in this manual
The following typographic conventions are used in this guide.
- Bold represents required components of a command or option that must be typed as shown.
- Italics represent variables defined, named or entered by the user.
- {Braces} enclose required arguments.
-
[Brackets] represent optional command components and may also be used in example command strings to emphasize required user defined variables in long strings.
Example:
reconcile queue {queuename} for {datasource-datadest} [on host]
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A vertical bar, or “pipe” character, ( | ) within brackets or braces indicates that you can use only one of the enclosed components.
Example:
abort service {service | all}
Names of commands, programs, directories and files are expressed in Bold.
Other names are expressed in capital letters using the default font.
Examples:
The sp_ctrl program is located in the bin directory.
Open the oramsglst file.
Find the value for ORACLE_HOME.
Click Apply.
System displays, such as prompts and command output, are expressed in a monofaced (fixed-space) font.
Examples:
sp_ctrl(sysA)>
User is a viewer (level=3)
Windows menu items, dialog boxes, and options within dialog boxes are expressed in Bold.
Example:
From the File menu, select Print.
System names are expressed generically or fictitiously. When necessary, the source system (or primary system) is referred to as SysA. Target systems (or secondary systems) are referred to as SysB, SysC, SysD, and so forth.
The advantages of SharePlex
SharePlex provides high-speed replication from Oracle (on-premises and Amazon RDS) databases to different target databases and messaging containers on major Unix, Linux and Windows platforms, both on-premises and in the cloud. SharePlex supports a wide variety of configurations to meet different and complex data availability needs. What's more, SharePlex includes — without extra charge — the compare and repair tools that you need to verify that replication is accurate and reliable.
Meet today's high-demand data availability requirements
SharePlex is designed for the nonstop replication of enterprise volumes of data. It is capable of replicating millions of transactions a day for thousands of tables and other objects. It supports business varieties of data, including large object types and National Language Character Set types, as well as Oracle XML and user-defined types.
You have full control over which data is replicated, and to where. Through column partitioning, you can replicate a subset of the columns of a table beyond a firewall, while protecting other, more sensitive data. Through row partitioning, you can replicate different records to different locations, or prevent the replication of certain records altogether. You can configure SharePlex to interact with PL/SQL procedures that transform data before, or instead of, posting it to a target database.
With SharePlex, your enterprise can ensure high availability, migrate data from one platform to another, and integrate data among many different datastores at once — whether locally, remote, or in the cloud. SharePlex not only supports standard query-driven replication targets, such as those for reporting, analytics and data warehousing, but it can also deliver the data to messaging systems and provide data in file or XML format for input to other enterprise solutions.
Support for a variety of replication sources and targets
SharePlex supports capture from and replication to many of today's popular datastores:
- Capture from Oracle (including Exadata) databases, replicating to Oracle target databases, including those hosted by Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle Cloud and PaaS cloud environments.
- Replication from Oracle sources to many popular ODBC-compliant databases, such as Microsoft SQL Server, SAP HANA, other PostgreSQL implementations, and Oracle MySQL. SharePlex supports replication to several of these databases in both Amazon EC2 and RDS cloud services as well as Microsoft Azure Marketplace.
- Oracle databases to targets other than relational database systems, such as flat files (SQL and XML format), JMS, and Apache Kafka (XML and JSON).
- Oracle to an Oracle change-history target, where each change to the source data is replicated as a new row in the target, leaving the previous state of the target intact and providing a history of every change that was made to the source data.
SharePlex replicates to many different targets at the same time, requiring only one configuration file to provide the routing instructions for them all.
Deploy quickly and easily, without frameworks or add-ons
Everything required for data replication is provided "out of the box" with SharePlex, without the need to buy any add-ons or management packs. This includes the SharePlex Manager monitoring GUI software, and a compare-repair utility for detecting and repairing out-of-sync data.
The installation of SharePlex is fast and straightforward, and it includes utilities that help you configure connections to a database. Complex replication scenarios, such as active-active or a multi-step cascading scenario, may require more time, but overall SharePlex is driven primarily from a single configuration file on each source system. This file supplies most of the needed replication instructions: table lists, special handling such as column mapping or partitioning, and data routing. A relatively small set of commands and files supplies the rest of the input for setup and control.
SharePlex makes it easy to synchronize the data and start replication. In the case of Oracle data, you can even allow transactions on the source data to continue while you copy the source data and populate the target. SharePlex keeps track of the ongoing changes during the copy and then reconciles those changes with the results of the copy, so that it only applies transactions that occurred after the copy. Database patches and upgrades can be accomplished with a similar technique.
Although SharePlex is a reliable, relatively low-maintenance solution, our top-rated support team is ready around the clock to help with any trouble you may have. To get you started with your deployment, our professional services team is highly experienced and readily available.
One all-inclusive solution for both replication and repair
When you have SharePlex, you have both replication and data compare-repair software all in the same package. You pay no extra. You can run the SharePlex Compare and Repair features on a regular basis to ensure the consistency of source and target data. Run Compare to detect hidden out-of-sync conditions, and run Repair to repair the target rows to restore synchronization. SharePlex detects extra or missing rows and rows where the values do not match. By repairing mismatches at the row level on a regular basis, you can avoid larger problems that may require full data resynchronization. You can customize your comparisons, for example to filter the rows that are compared. These features work without stopping user activity or replication processing.
Maintain an Oracle high availability environment
In an Oracle environment, SharePlex supports reliable high availability configurations where replication maintains a duplicate database in a different location that is ready for fast, seamless failover and failback in planned or unplanned mode. If the primary system fails, transaction activity moves to the secondary system and continues while the secondary instance is copied to the primary system during recovery. SharePlex reconciles the copy with the replicated transactions from the secondary system, then discards operations that were already applied by the copy. After SharePlex restores synchronization of the data, transaction activity can move back to the primary system.
SharePlex also supports reliable replication recovery in deployments where the source and target are mirrored, such as with disk mirroring or Oracle Data Guard. SharePlex quickly recovers replication whether the source fails, the target fails, or both fail.
Conserve system resources
SharePlex performs replication without significantly impacting the source database, the source system, or the network. SharePlex reads the Oracle redo logs changes as they occur, rather than on a refresh schedule, this reduces the impact of replication on the network and does not cause spikes in network performance. This design also minimizes latency between source and target systems. Removing non-transactional data use from the production server improves the performance of the production database while enabling target databases to be optimized for the needs of their users.
Replicate with both speed and accuracy
SharePlex is fast, minimizing the latency between source and target databases by capturing changes to configured objects continuously. SharePlex maintains read consistency, maintaining operation order and session context all the way to the target. SharePlex uses standard SQL to apply replicated changes to the target database.
SharePlex continuously reads the transaction stream and sends the appropriate data to the target as quickly as possible, even before it receives a commit record. In the case of Oracle, if a transaction is canceled, SharePlex simply replicates the rollback so that the target remains an accurate representation of the source.
SharePlex provides tools to help you maximize replication throughput. Named queues enable you to split large transaction volumes into parallel processing streams. Hash partitioning enables you to split the rows of large tables across parallel Post processes.
Maintain fault tolerance and control
SharePlex tolerates outages regardless of where they occur. If the target system is down, or if there are network problems, SharePlex stores the data on the source system until operations and connections are restored. If the target system is running but the target database or receiving software itself is down, SharePlex queues the captured data on the target system until the target is available again.
You have control over when SharePlex sends the data to the target. By default, SharePlex sends a steady stream of data to the target systems, but you can delay transmission by stopping the Export process. You can delay the posting of data to a target by stopping or delaying the Post process.
Reduce downtime and risk from migrations
Hardware migrations usually require a significant amount of downtime, whether you need to change hardware platforms, move a data center, or consolidate servers to reduce costs. By maintaining a near-realtime copy of the database, SharePlex can help you minimize migration downtime by enabling the original system to function normally until the migration is complete.
