Setting up and managing a continuous replication environment

The goal of continuous replication is to try and maintain identical copies of an applications database between two sites. You can do this by operating IMS Replication all of the time, replicating changes that are made at a source site and applying them at a target site.

IMS Replication uses asynchronous data capture, so while the source databases are changing, individual database records are not point-in-time consistent but the goal is to configure the system so that a change made at the source site is applied to the target within a few seconds under normal operating conditions.

To support this model, the source and target databases should be structurally identical so that any changes that are made by a source application can be applied to a matching target database. This environment also requires the source and target databases to contain the identical contents. To prevent apply failures, an individual database record should only be updated at the source site.

The conflict exit can be used to try and compensate for source and target discrepancies when the contents of the source and target database are not the same.