The Data Distributor Manager is the control center of all operations performed by Data Distributor. You should use it to define and manage all publishing activities related to the Data Distributor Services running in your environment.

The Data Distributor Manager provides the following capabilities:

• Definition of various default values for the Data Distributor services.

• Definition of AS/400, MS SQL, Oracle and Open/36 servers as publishers.

• Creation and management of publications.

• Monitoring of the last activity of all publications.

• Monitoring of current activities and history of all publications.

 

Replication Wizards

Data Distributor includes various replication wizards and numerous dialog boxes to help simplify the steps necessary to develop, implement, and maintain replication.

• The New Server dialog helps you define new publishers by specifying communication, security and licensing information. Publishers can be IBM AS/400, Microsoft SQL, Oracle and Open/36 Servers.

• The Create Publication Wizard helps you create a publication from the data stored at the publisher.

• The Push Subscription Wizard helps you “push” a subscription from a publication on one server to one or more subscribers and applications such as SQL servers, IBM AS/400 servers, Oracle servers, Open/36 servers, Microsoft® Access™ databases, Microsoft® Excel™ workbooks, text delimited files and FTP locations.
  

 
After you have used the wizards to initially configure replication and create publications and articles, you can change most of the initial settings through property dialog boxes.

Replication Methods

Data Distributor provides several types of replication method to use as you design your distributed applications:

• Snapshot

As its name implies, snapshot replication takes a picture, or snapshot, of the published data at one moment in time.

• Transactional

For Transactional replication, when the data is updated at the Publisher, changes are incrementally sent to the Subscribers. Transactional replication guarantees transactional consistency but requires greater administration and connectivity.

• Journal

For Journal replication, changes made at the publisher are incrementally sent to the subscribers. These changes are appended together resulting in a journal of all the changes made at the publisher. Journal replication is suitable when all individual transactions are required for reporting or audit purposes.

 
Each of these types provides different capabilities and different attributes for transaction consistency and site autonomy.

By choosing a replication type, you have the opportunity to develop significant new distributed applications. Also, the decisions are not mutually exclusive. It is not uncommon for the same application to use multiple replication types. Some of its data may require immediate consistency, while other data may not.

All the above allow extensive customization of the resulting data, you can customize the entire resulting schema, apply row and column filters, define the replication schedule and many other features that allow you to get your data the way you want it.

Data Distributor's Recovery Manager can be used to recover the publishing activities that were affected by a system unavailability or by a communication error. The Recovery Manager has the capability to recover all types of publications. A recovery will resynchronized the Data Distributor's publishing processes with the publisher by processing the data accumulated at the publisher and reestablishing the appropriate replication status so the subscribers' data is synchronized with the publisher's data.

You can use the Replication Monitor to monitor the publishing activities of the publications. Using the Data Distributor's Replication Monitor, you can obtain the current status of the publications, review the history of the related replication agents and access error details when applicable. You will be notified of communication errors for all publishers configured in Data Distributor.