Replication Environment

A replication environment is a set of servers—including Replication Servers, data servers, and Replication Agents—that participate in replication.

A replication environment does not need to contain all the server types in a replication system domain. It can be a subset of the replication domain identified by the ID Server. In the replication system, one Replication Server® serves as the ID Server. The ID Server assigns unique ID numbers to every Replication Server and database in the system. The ID Server also maintains version information for the system.

These are the servers that you can monitor in your Sybase Control Center replication environment:

Data Server– a database within a data server may act as the source (primary database) of transaction data or may be the destination (replicate or standby database) of transaction data.
Replication Agent™ for Adaptive Server® Enterprise (ASE) – is embedded within an Adaptive Server Enterprise and is called RepAgent Thread. The RepAgent Thread reads the transaction data from the primary database transaction log and sends it to Replication Server for distribution to the replicate databases.
Replication Server – receives the replicated transaction data from a replication agent or another Replication Server, converts it into SQL, and applies the SQL to the replicate or standby databases. Replication Server delivers operational data across complex and broadly distributed data-infrastructures in near real-time. The primary and replicate databases can be Sybase or non-Sybase data servers.
Replication Agent – reads the primary database transactions from database transaction logs, then sends those transactions to Replication Server for distribution to the replicate databases. Replication Agents allow non-Sybase data servers to act as the primary data servers in a replication system based on Sybase replication technology.
Mirror Replication Agent – a component in a Mirror Activator disaster recovery environment and, in conjunction with a storage replication system, reads the primary database transactions from mirror log devices, then sends those transactions to Replication Server for distribution to the standby databases. The Mirror Activator provides an integrated disaster recovery solution with:
- Standby databases protected from disk corruption (by logical, not literal, replication).
- Synchronous replication, with zero data loss and guaranteed data integrity (transaction consistency).
- Complete coverage for databases, as well as non-database systems.
Sybase IQ – a highly optimized analytics server that works with diverse data, including unstructured data and different data sources. It serves as a replicate database in the replication environment.

The replication environment also includes:

Components – are objects in a server in a replication environment. Examples of components in a Replication Server are connections, routes, and queues.
Replication path – is the set of servers through which transactions pass when moving from the primary to the replicate database.