Why synchronize data

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You may unsubscribe from these communications at any time. For more information, check out our privacy policy. Written by Luna Campos. When we're listening to music or watching a concert, all the musicians and instruments need to be synchronized.

Otherwise, we're just listening to a lot of disparate sounds that don't make sense. Our clocks all need to be in sync, too — if each clock told a different time, daily life would be complete chaos. We would never be able to make deadlines, catch flights, or even properly communicate with one another.

The same principle applies to business. If an organization's departments, goals, and software applications are not in sync, there's no way the business can move forward and grow. And, while many business owners know that aligning departments and goals is important, a lot of them also overlook the importance of synchronizing business data.

Let's take a look at what data synchronization is, why it's important, and how to implement it in your business. Data synchronization is the process of consolidating data across different sources and software applications, making sure that the data within all of your systems is consistent. Data synchronization is about keeping the data consistent over time too, so it's a continuous process that applies for existing and new data.

Each business collects and handles data through dozens of different apps, with some companies working with well over software tools to run the business.

With all this information coming in from so many different sources, it's easy for your databases to become disjointed and disorganized if they're not talking to one another. When business data is not in sync, it can lead to all sorts of negative effects , such as:.

So, just like our clocks need to be consistent in telling the same time, your business data and applications also need to be in sync. Synchronized data means that you can have a crystal-clear view of all aspects of the business, produce reliable and actionable reports, make informed decisions, communicate transparently, and align your departments towards common goals.

If you've seen some of our other articles talking about data integration , all this might sound familiar. So the question arises: what's the difference between data integration and synchronization?

The truth is that these two concepts can indeed be similar, but they're not exactly synonymous. Data integration means combining two or more pieces of software so that they're working in tandem. Synchronization is a type of integration in which data is kept consistent between two or more databases.

There are lots of different ways to achieve integration. However, unlike other integration processes, synchronization has the power to keep databases in continuous communication - the keyword being "keep", as it's an ongoing process between different tools.

In a nutshell, data synchronization is a type of integration, but not all integration processes result in a true sync of the data. Data synchronization is also used in data mirroring, where each data set is exactly replicated or synchronized within another device.

By: Justin Stoltzfus Contributor, Reviewer. By: Satish Balakrishnan. Dictionary Dictionary Term of the Day. High-Performance Cloud Computing. Techopedia Terms. Connect with us. Sign up. Term of the Day. Best of Techopedia weekly. However, in order to ensure the consistency and accuracy of data for both legacy and new systems that read the data, a data synchronization mechanism should be available between the two systems.

Business is now distributed globall y: Organizations tend to have data distributed geographically for multiple purposes. These include running the business internationally, maintaining low latency, reducing network usage cost, and achieving high availability.

When an update happens in a given system of a different region, it has to be also reflected in systems that are located in other regions.

For an example, when a new product becomes available, that particular information should be available in all the regions even though the region-wise data instances are different. Ease of maintena nce: An organization may have ten departments, and these departments have their own databases for the ease of maintenance.

However, both sales and marketing departments need product details that are published by the production department. Therefore, all three data instances should be in sync. Security: Organizations need to differentiate the data that can be accessed by different parties due to security issues. A production department may want to provide the data to be accessed by the customers.

Also, there will be reads viewing available products and writes placing orders to the data, which the organization expects to keep separately due to security concerns. When a new product is manufactured, the customer portal should get updated.

Similarly, when a customer places an order, the production portal should get updated even though these transactions are reflected in the respective portal databases, data synchronization ensures that it is updated in other databases as well. Some of the techniques used to retrieve the data for the synchronization are as follows. Change log capturing: Changes can be added to a log, and then the log reader can read its events and send them to a relevant system or source.

Distributed transactions: This involves spanning a transaction to be executed in multiple data sources. Querying the data by timestamps: A table can use a select query with a where clause that has a timestamp and send the result set to a relevant system or source. Capturing data changes using table triggers: The database itself sends the change events to a relevant system or source.

Listening to a particular directory or file: The system checks for a file update, reads the new lines, and sends the update to a relevant system or source. WSO2 Streaming Integrator is powered by Siddhi IO , which is an in house stream processing engine that is designed to process complex events in real time. Siddhi queries can also transform data to any given definition by adding or removing attributes to the data.

Siddhi fault stream has been implemented to gracefully handle failover scenarios that occur during runtime. When implementing the sources and sinks, the security measurements have been taken. For an example, you can can enable basic auth and enable key-stores, etc. A developer needs to write several siddhi queries in order to synchronize data using WSO2 Streaming Integrator. WSO2 SI publishes statistics from its sinks and sources to Prometheus allowing them to be later visualized via Grafana dashboards.

Let's see how WSO2 Streaming Integrator caters to the data synchronization requirements using a simple scenario which is mentioned in our second use case System Migrations. Let's eliminate all the publishing and receiving parties from the deployment and simplify the last diagram, and see how the data synchronization can be done. In order to keep both systems in synchronization, the changes happening in the database and file systems should be transferred to the Kafka server and via HTTP to the new systems.