Loosely Coupled Federation
If nothing else, you probably have a distributed system configuration that can best be described as aloosely coupled federation. Are you sending sales transactions from an Oracle database to a mainframe for billing? Are you extracting audit trails from your web server into a data warehouse? Are you reconciling the phone company’s electronic invoices with your voice mail system? Each of these scenarios could be classified as a database federation. The data may be in disparate forms, and there are no real-time transactions taking place.
If one or more of the databases in your federation is Oracle based, you can use a variety of techniques to move data from one database to another, including:
- Database links
If both sites are Oracle based, data can be selected, inserted, or updated over a database link.
- SQL*Loader
This tool loads non-Oracle data from a formatted text file into an Oracle table.
- Pro*C/C++, Pro*COBOL, Pro*FORTAN, Pro*Ada
Oracle precompilers allow you to embed SQL statements into programs, allowing you to migrate data from a file or other external source into Oracle.
- Oracle Gateway products
These products provide SQL access from an Oracle database to a foreign data source.
The key to success with a federated database system is a written specification and robustness. Because these systems are often cobbled together over time and often viewed as informal stopgaps, their quality often suffers. It is not uncommon for such a system to come completely unraveled ...