What Is Transactional Replication?

It's a funny thing about data. It changes. Sometimes, that change is a big one. When it comes to your database, you want to be aware of the situation if your data suddenly changes. That's where transactional replication comes in! Transactional replication is the automated periodic distribution of changes between databases. Information is copied in (or near) real-time from the primary server (publisher) to the receiving database (subscriber). Thus, transactional replication offers an excellent backup for frequent, daily database changes. Transactional replication works by creating a log of changes at the publisher and then applying those changes to the subscriber. This process typically happens every 10–15 minutes, but it can vary depending on the type of data, the size of the data set, and other factors. Transactional replication is often used to keep a company's data in sync across multiple sites, reducing the risk of a primary data center failure. Transactional replication also enables data integrity checks at the subscriber level, which can be especially helpful in enterprises where data must meet compliance standards. It is critical to ensure transactional replication accuracy, as any inaccuracies would cause data inconsistency and potential risk to your organization. Many factors can negatively impact replication accuracy, ranging from network latency to hardware issues. The key to ensuring replication accuracy is to monitor for any problems proactively. Most enterprise-level database software comes with built-in monitoring and alerting capabilities. When you need your database to be up and running at all times, there's no better way to ensure it stays that way than transactional replication. With its near real-time nature, transactional replication is frequently used as a failover mechanism where more than a few minutes of downtime is not an option, e.g., in ATM networks and nuclear power stations. In this regard, transactional replication has proven to be a reliable mechanism for backup databases.