One of the main attractions of Dbvisit Standby is that it takes the complication out of setting up and running Oracle standby databases.
Mike Meerding, Database Administrator, Australia

Reporting Database

Up-to-date and efficient reporting is a critical requirement for businesses to make the most of their data, however running reports is a hardware intensive activity that can impact the performance and availability of online systems.

Dbvisit Reporting allows organizations that use Oracle databases to easily create dedicated reporting environments. These environments remove the resource demands of reporting from the online system and allow users to create reports with their favorite report writing tools.

Using proven data replication techniques, Dbvisit Reporting creates and manages a subset of the transaction database, which can be used exclusively for reporting purposes in real time. Transactional and online systems continue to use the original database, while large, resource-hungry and time-consuming reporting jobs are run against the dedicated reporting database.

The following diagram illustrates a straightforward feed of database changes from an application database to a reporting database, using Dbvisit Reporting:

Reporting Database overview

Dbvisit Reporting provides a platform that delivers cost-effective creation and operation of a reporting database. Dbvisit Reporting uses data replication to synchronize data, enabling processing to be offloaded to alternative databases and server platforms, making these databases available for ad-hoc and pre-defined reporting using a range of tools.

The benefits of using Dbvisit Reporting to maintain a dedicated reporting database include:

Reporting data is always up-to-date.
Reporting is always available
Enables reporting from Oracle or MySQL, leveraging existing tools and skills
Provide Active Data Guard functionality for Oracle Standard Edition
Column exclusion to ensure unnecessary data items are not replicated
Dedicated reporting platform reduces potential for impact on the online processing systems
Dedicated reporting hardware can prevent the need for costly upgrades to the online system’s hardware
Cost-effective – reporting can be offloaded to commodity hardware and operating systems
Reporting database can be tuned specifically for the purpose of reporting while the online database can be tuned for online transactional access
Requires no changes to the source data

Please see tabs below for details on how you can this works, and why you would want to do it.

How it works
Why have a reporting database?

Dbvisit Reporting uses data replication to synchronize data across databases, enabling reporting activities to be offloaded to an alternative platform. This delivers significant benefit at the infrastructure layer, facilitating real time business reporting and reducing the impact of reporting on online systems.

Dbvisit Reporting is powerful, affordable software that is simple to install and configure. Dbvisit Reporting provides replication from Oracle to Oracle and MySQL databases and comes with all the tools and utilities necessary to deliver easy management, including conflict detection and resolution.

Dbvisit Reporting uses the highly efficient change data capture (CDC) mining technology from Dbvisit Replicate to detect changes in the source data and to replicate and distribute these changes across Oracle and non-Oracle databases. The mining process runs outside of the database, meaning it is non-intrusive and does not impact the performance of the online system.

In addition to the built-in conflict detection and resolution processes, Dbvisit Reporting’s caching ensures all committed records are securely delivered to the target database(s) even in the event of an outage, ensuring that the reporting database remains up-to-date and available.

When exchanging data outside of a LAN, either over a WAN or over the Internet, Dbvisit Reporting encrypts the data to ensure it is sent securely from the source database to the reporting database. Within a LAN environment this security can be tuned off.

Modern organizations place a wide range of demands on the solutions they run, from around-the-clock access to data across the enterprise, to advanced reporting requirements. This combination can place significant demands on database servers and the databases they manage.

A tool like Dbvisit Reporting uses data replication across multiple servers to spread the load and widen the availability of data. It also allows each of the accessing applications, including reporting tools, to connect to a copy of the data that is tailored to their usage. Each automatically maintained copy of the data can be tailored, from the data available, to its structure and the way it is stored (e.g. indexes). This allows an organization to make the same data available from multiple sources, and to tune each to the individual requirements of the application or user.