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Thread My server crashed !!!
Mon, Feb 6 2017 8:13 AMPermanent Link

kamran

Hi

Last Friday my cloud server went down. it is still down. The engineers are working to fix it !

So it just highlights how vulnerable we are with customers data hosted in the cloud.

I think database replication should be built into ALL databases and be easy to use.
It has become or should be a standard feature that everyone should use.

Has anybody here (apart  from Tim) got replication for dbisam to work for their customers ?

1. If so,  is it easy to do ?

2. how well does it work ?

its just one dbisam database with about 14 tables hosted on a dedicated server.
so i would just need a regular sync of the database  (local server ip) to cloud server (ip)
I guess then that the main database would be run locally and synced with the cloud server at regular intervals.

3. Any pointers welcome.

Regards

Kamran
Mon, Feb 6 2017 9:29 AMPermanent Link

Raul

Team Elevate Team Elevate

On 2/6/2017 8:13 AM, kamran wrote:
> Last Friday my cloud server went down. it is still down. The engineers are working to fix it !
> So it just highlights how vulnerable we are with customers data hosted in the cloud.

That's very unfortunate and hope they get it back up and running soon.

> I think database replication should be built into ALL databases and be easy to use.
> It has become or should be a standard feature that everyone should use.

As part of the wider solution yes. However, one should not forget about
regular backups that are stored offsite as well - replication and backup
serve different purposes.

> Has anybody here (apart  from Tim) got replication for dbisam to work for their customers ?

Yes but we did not use Tim's solution. Uut app has number of special
requirements (like replicating application state data in real time also)
and at the time Tim had not posted his replication code.

Before we finished the replication we had also created a utility to take
regular backups and send them to another server and restore - for our
app and usage this worked OK and could be run hourly or so.

Raul
Tue, Feb 7 2017 4:21 AMPermanent Link

kamran

Hi Raul

>regular backups that are stored offsite as well - replication and backup
>serve different purposes.

Agreed

>Before we finished the replication we had also created a utility to take
>regular backups and send them to another server and restore - for our
>app and usage this worked OK and could be run hourly or so.

so is that a raw copy of data from one database to another

eg "dbisamdatabaseLocal"   "dbisamdatabaseRemote" setup on an hourly timer

I Like that idea !

Thanks

Kamran

Raul wrote:



On 2/6/2017 8:13 AM, kamran wrote:
> Last Friday my cloud server went down. it is still down. The engineers are working to fix it !
> So it just highlights how vulnerable we are with customers data hosted in the cloud.

That's very unfortunate and hope they get it back up and running soon.

> I think database replication should be built into ALL databases and be easy to use.
> It has become or should be a standard feature that everyone should use.

As part of the wider solution yes. However, one should not forget about
regular backups that are stored offsite as well - replication and backup
serve different purposes.

> Has anybody here (apart  from Tim) got replication for dbisam to work for their customers ?

Yes but we did not use Tim's solution. Uut app has number of special
requirements (like replicating application state data in real time also)
and at the time Tim had not posted his replication code.

Before we finished the replication we had also created a utility to take
regular backups and send them to another server and restore - for our
app and usage this worked OK and could be run hourly or so.

Raul
Tue, Feb 7 2017 8:36 AMPermanent Link

Raul

Team Elevate Team Elevate

On 2/7/2017 4:21 AM, kamran wrote:
> so is that a raw copy of data from one database to another
> eg "dbisamdatabaseLocal"   "dbisamdatabaseRemote" setup on an hourly timer

Basically yes - we're still using dbisam backup routines and wrote a
custom backup/restore utility that can be run thru windows scheduler
(and interactively as well).

Resulting backup file is either ftp'd or file copied to a destination.
Destination can be just a nas/remote storage (in which case this is just
pure offsite file backup) or in our case it was often another system
which then ran the restore part of utility on schedule as well.

In our case (due to the nature of the app) we were able to optimize this
and for example skip number of tables from hourly backups (archive data
in our case - this would get backed up once every night but not hourly)
so backups were manageable size.

Replication i would look at Tim's code today but we started way before
so for us it was basically a remote--remote one way data pump : read
source dataset, compare to destination dataset and insert/update records
(generic code to loop over records and for each row it loops over all
fields).

In our case all tables have primary key fields for matching the records
so compare is relatively easy.

We also have custom dbsrvr with insert/update/delete triggers so each
record timestamp is updated and this way our replication knows which
rows actually changed (and only has to process very small subset of
records after initial sync).

Delete is a special case (since record is deleted from table) so for
that we have a special table that basically tracks the table name and
primary key value in a special "deleted data" table and then our
replication logic can simply apply those deletes when it runs (it
processes the delete before it does the table compare).

Hope this helps. However as i said i would suggest use Tim's replication
code as that has lot of this already handled.

Raul
Tue, Feb 14 2017 2:45 PMPermanent Link

Tim Young [Elevate Software]

Elevate Software, Inc.

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Email timyoung@elevatesoft.com

Kamran,

The latest DBISAM build 5 that was just uploaded (as well as Build 4) includes the latest DBISAM Database Server with mirroring support.  You can find it in the:

\servers\dbsrvr\mirror

subdirectory under the main installation directory for any of the DBISAM VCL-CS products.

Directions for configuring the mirroring are here:

http://www.elevatesoft.com/blog?action=view&id=mirroring_dbisam_database_server_code

Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com
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