Jerry Huang apps and developing apps

The previous blog I wrote last night is something about DbMoto. Today I found that my feeling is a bit more than that, so I list out the summary how I feel after using this product.

1. It’s basically a good tool for syncalizing data from DB2 to SQL, in my case. Easy to setup and use comparing with some jumbo products. It provides a nice GUI tool to setup and manage replications.
2. Not very good for real time change data capture, currently we set the interval to 30 minutes, i.e. data will sync from DB2 to SQL every 30 minutes. There was a time we set to 5 minute but it seems there were some problems. I am not sure about the detail (I'm not in the AS400 team), what I heard fromt my colleague is that the receiver in AS400 caused the CPU overran.
3. The product and the company have a long history and the market share is growing. The support is ok; so far they solved all problems we hit, as I can remember.
4. I believe the engine is base on .Net framework 2.0, so it needs to run on a Windows server. This is ok for us but some people insist the performance is better if a product is base on non-Microsoft server.
5. Very good extensibility, we can write our own script into the replication. We are using VB.NET as script language, but I guess it also supports other .NET languages. The script will be compiled to .NET binary code so the efficiency will be better than those dynamically compile.
6. Scripting is good but also brings the biggest problem – there is no way to debug the script in development. What we are doing now, is to write log for debugging. For development, ideally we hope the dbmoto engine somehow can call into Visual Studio so that we may set breakpoint, watch the value of local variables, etc. Due to this, we avoid to put something too complicated in the scripts.

Overall, I will say dbmoto is a light-weight to medium change data capture engine, to keep 2 different databases identical. If your requirement is not about some sort of comprehensive ETL solution, just to sync data from one place to another, DbMoto should be a good tool for that. However, it might not suit for you if require extremely low latency (i.e real time) syncalization. Hmmm, but real-time is a big challenge for all products.