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What is Database replication? Advantages and Limitations of Database Replication.

Database replication is the process of creating and maintaining multiple copies of a database in different locations or on different servers. The purpose of replication is to provide redundancy and improve availability and performance of the database. 

In database replication, changes made to the primary or master database are replicated to one or more secondary or replica databases in real-time or near-real-time. This process can be done synchronously or asynchronously, and in different topologies such as master-slave or master-master. Replication can be done within the same data center or across geographically dispersed locations.

 

Advantages of Database Replication: 

Improved availability: Database replication provides redundancy and failover capabilities, ensuring that the database remains available even in the event of a hardware or network failure. 

Improved performance: Replication can improve database performance by offloading read queries to secondary databases, reducing the load on the primary database. 

Disaster recovery: Replication can be used as part of a disaster recovery strategy, allowing for the quick recovery of a database in the event of a catastrophic failure. 

Scaling: Replication can be used to scale a database horizontally, by adding additional replica databases to handle increased read traffic. 

Limitations of Database Replication: 

Increased complexity: Database replication adds complexity to a system, requiring additional hardware and software to manage and maintain. 

Consistency: Maintaining consistency across multiple replica databases can be challenging, especially when replication is done asynchronously. 

Latency: Asynchronous replication can introduce latency, with changes made to the primary database taking some time to propagate to the replica databases. 

Cost: Database replication can be expensive, requiring additional hardware and software licenses, and increasing operational costs.

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