Need help in beating Oracle

Hi! I kindly ask for your support in the following matter: a client wants to implement in 8 locations a database system. Ofc., we suggested first IDS Workgroup, but we then discovered that the only replication IDS/WKG supports is HDR, no CDR, and we should buy IDS full in order to use ER (CDR). But IDS is much more expensive (3 times the licence price as WKG, min. 10 licenses per site) and the customer said it has a better offer from Oracle. The customer needs an update anywhere system, with replication at the table level. My questions: 1. Can someone tell me something regarding Oracle replication? Something like: how is it comparing to Informix replication, which Oracle servers have it and which don't and so on 2. At one time there was a romour that IDS WKG 7.31 will include ER. Is that true? 3. Is there ANY chance to make ER/CDR work between an IDS server and a IDS/WKG server? 4. What third-party replication products would you recommend? Thank you very much! Sebastian Paul A.

Working on Sunday, must be important! I believe that IDS/WKG (7.30) has the replication code in it because Informix thought that time would be better spent adding new features to IER rather than disabling the work group product! However, contractually there is an obligation not to use the feature unless some type of arrangement is made with Informix or through a reseller partner. This may be a good idea if the workgroup product meets performance and capacity needs As far as the Oracle replication product, they use a trigger based capture mechanism. They recently created "internal triggers" to attempt to improve performance. I have not implemented Oracle's product, however Informix's replication architecture would seem to be faster. Of course it all depends... I doubt that "Oracle gave us a better price.." is valid. If the central site is Informix I would lean toward using Informix at the other sites because niether Informix's product nor Oracle's product talk bidirectionally to each other. If the central site is Oracle ..... There are many many things that could make one product better than the other for any given situation. Third party products are generally a packaged, "roll your own" type. By this I mean you get a bunch of queue table, triggers, stored procedures and external processes to poll for changes or capture changes using triggers writing to queue table (gross oversimplication on my part). I would suggest using integrated database replication, or if the amount of data to move is limited and won't be scaled up (ya right) you could roll your own. Rolling you own gets ugly when you have many tables, very dynamic data and a variable number of sites. Good Luck, Bob Carts Science Applications International Corporation Paul Avarvarei wrote in message <7aotcr$e40$1@news.xmission.com>... > >Hi! > >I kindly ask for your support in the following matter: a client wants to >implement in 8 locations a database system. Ofc., we suggested first IDS >Workgroup, but we then discovered that the only replication IDS/WKG >supports is HDR, no CDR, and we should buy IDS full in order to use ER >(CDR). But IDS is much more expensive (3 times the licence price as WKG, >min. 10 licenses per site) and the customer said it has a better offer >from Oracle. The customer needs an update anywhere system, with >replication at the table level. My questions: 1. Can someone tell me >something regarding Oracle replication? Something like: how is it >comparing to Informix replication, which Oracle servers have it and which >don't and so on 2. At one time there was a romour that IDS WKG 7.31 will >include ER. Is that true? 3. Is there ANY chance to make ER/CDR work >between an IDS server and a IDS/WKG server? 4. What third-party >replication products would you recommend? > >Thank you very much! >Sebastian Paul A. > >