RFI - Best ways to sync data across platforms

Subject: RFI - Best ways to sync data across platforms Newsgroups: comp.client-server Summary: Keywords: Here the classic problem, which method is the best to maintain data across platforms? We currently get most of our raw data from the mainframe. We download data and initially load our local database tables. Time goes by and we require new data from the mainframe periodically (daily, weekly, monthly). The data on the mainframe is not in sync with the local databases data. Most of the time the mainframe data has priority so we can delete all the local data and reload from the mainframe, but this is obviously very inefficent. We can't afford some of the gateway tools to do host to server updates in "real time". So, my question is; What is the best way to replicate data with batch like processes? What other alternatives are there? Is there a low cost alternative to the gateways? Our environment has a mainframe IDMS database, Informix RDBMS on a Unix box, and clients connected via a Novell Lan to Informix. The mainframe has no tcp/ip connectivity so we download the data to the Lan, then upload it to the Unix box. This environment is part of our problem. What can we do to fix this process? John Casavant