B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

Master Site
St
/ Company A\
Snapshot Site Snapshot Site
Integration Patterns 53
Subset 81 * ' Subset
of Data Sal of Data
Company B Company C
Multi-site data replication
Figure 3.4. — Bi-directional data replication
Multi-site data replication architecture involves two or more data sources,
with each data source replicating the exact same data to one another
(see Figure 3.5). This is a special type of bi-directional data replication,
which involves dealing with the same data. This architecture takes the
maximum resources and involves the highest risk of data corruption
among all the data replication architectures.
Benefits of data replication
Replication allows for maintaining the same copy of data in multiple
physical servers, thereby providing multiple data access points. Thus, if
the local server is unavailable, users can always point to the remote
server and continue with their work.
Furthermore, replication is very useful in the B2B scenario, as
applications of each company can point to their own internal database,
rather than connecting to remote databases and accessing the data over
the Internet. This will make the applications fast and minimize the
network traffic. However, the timeliness of the data is an issue, as the