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multiple databases staying in real-time sync

Hello Experts,

I'm looking for opinions/suggestions on a project I'm working on. I have four stations/PC's setup which will be used to submit user data from a form to a mysql database housed locally on each station. The reason for housing locally is each station is independent of each other if for some reason hardware/software failure occurs. My problem is: I need to keep all submitted data updated on all 4 stations so that I do not get repeat data entered from two different workstations. I'm thinking some type of automated sync, or sync every second, or sync per transaction. Any opinions/suggestions on the best way to approach this is greatly appreciated.

Thanks

NovaDenizen

Your requirements are somewhat contradictory. You want things to stay synchronized, but you also want them to keep working even when communications go down. I think you need to decide which of those requirements is more important.

If avoidance of inconsistency is more important, then you need a single central server. If your communications go down to the central server, you can't make any changes. You could use replication to maintain a local read-only copy of the central server so you could still have access to an old copy of the data when communications are down.

If it's more important to let people make changes while communications is down, then you have to maintain 4 separate local databases, and you need a piece of software that can look at the timestamps on the most recent records in each database and fix any inconstencies that are detected, so consistency is eventually restored. Consistency is something that is continually lost and regained.

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chigs20

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itwanlan

ASKER

Thanks for the answer chigs.

I think this will be exactly what we are looking for.