Guild Companies

Many businesses are faced with the challenge of accessing data from multiple databases and operating systems and integrating that data in order to make the best use of information throughout their organization. Vision Solutions, one of the prominent managed availability vendors in the midrange, announced last week that its data replication product, Symbiator 4.1, was immediately available and is offering new enhancements. It replaces Symbiator 4.0, which was introduced in April 2002.

Leading the list of improvements are items such as improved performance for both real-time and bulk-data replication, a redesigned user interface, transformation and filtering features that allow users to customize their data transformation and filtering environment, and support for the Food and Drug Administration's CFR 21 Part 11 requirements for electronic record keeping.

As was the case with the previous version, Symbiator 4.1 supports the following databases: IBM DB2 UDB Version 7.2 and later for Windows, Linux, and Unix platforms, IBM DB2/400 V4R5 and later for AS/400 and iSeries platforms, Oracle 8i and 9I for Windows, Linux, and Unix, Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 and 2000 for Windows, and Sybase ASE Version 11.9.2 and later, running Windows, Unix, and Linux. Symbiator 4.1 can integrate with virtually all operating systems by making use of ODBC links to databases and runs on a Windows 2000 server.

Vision Solutions completely revamped its pricing with this release. No longer is price based on the size of the source and destination servers, with subsequent increases in licensing as newer and larger servers are added. The software investment is now based on a per-engine basis and there's a flat rate for every source database. The size of the server and the type of database have no bearing on the price. Specific pricing information was not made available by the company.

Speaking on the topic of replication performance, Herman Taljaard, product manager for Symbiator, said Vision has been able to add new features without having a negative impact. Taljaard said that by making use of the latest generation of ODBC drivers, real-time performance has picked up and should be most noticeable in WAN environments and at companies that depend on a large volume of replication. In the bulk-replication environment, he said, Symbiator 4.1 takes advantage of native technology in each of the supported databases in order to gain speed.

Performance, Taljaard said, will always vary depending on how fast the source database can generate transactions and how fast its database can process transactions that come through the applications that sit on top of it.

Performance is also affected by the complexity of the transformation requirements, which are resource-intensive. "If you push data through without changing the data," Taljaard said, "it moves quickly. Adding calculations and performing transformations on the data reduces performance. In WAN environments, bandwidth will have an effect on how fast data flows." He said Vision analyzes the database environment and transaction volumes with a customer to determine what will happen during replication. Variables that impact performance are noted, and the customer gets a realistic idea of the performance level.

Taljaard also emphasized ease-of-use features that make the installation of the Symbiator engine, the linking of the sources and destinations, and the adding of tables, fields, and views, more logical. The software can be up and running, he said, within a couple of hours.

According to the product manager, Vision has four clients already using Symbiator 4.1, even though it has been available only since May 27. In one instance, which happens to be an iSeries-only environment, the corporate headquarters is using it to push data downstream to regional and international offices. Another customer has an Internet-based ordering and account management system that requires information to be integrated between a database server and both Linux and Windows Web servers, and then on to a secondary database, where Web users (customers) can access it. In this case, the primary database remains on the AS/400.

In a non-iSeries example, Taljaard noted a customer with a Baan ERP system sitting on Oracle and a manufacturing system for the shop floor that runs on SQL Server database. All orders are processed through the Baan system, sent to the shop floor database, then managed and controlled from there, with replication sent back to the Baan system. The company has three locations in Europe, one in South America, one in Canada, and two in Asia. Information from all those factories is collected and used to build a corporate data warehouse in the United States. The combined information is reported back to the factories.