RE: RFI - Best ways to sync data across platforms

We have the same problem delivering information for our corporate database to our store databases. We load/transfer the data from out corporate server to the stores database, but we load the data into an identical table, but with a different name .i.e product_tmp, barcode_tmp, etc. After all the data has been loaded and indexed in the working tables, we drop the original table and rename the working table to the original tables's name. This minimizes the downtime and effect on the user. The only drawback is that we can't schedule the dropping and renaming of the table in a cron entry. It must be part of a store closing procedure. Oh well, that's life. If you are using Informix SE on the mainframe and local sites, you can also just create a table/index file under specifed name and just copy the file from the mainframe to the local site. ===================================================================== Paul Watje Database Something or Another watjep@hasting.com Hastings Books, Music, & Video ---------- From: ilist To: informix-list Subject: RFI - Best ways to sync data across platforms Date: Thursday, March 09, 1995 9:53PM 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