Interview Questions

Why does SAP uses ALE instead of database replication or distributed databases?

SAP Reports,SAP DB,ALE, SAP Tables questions and answers


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Why does SAP uses ALE instead of database replication or distributed databases?

Database replication is another possibility for doing business object synchronization. However, there are some major disadvantages with database replication. At the moment database replication is database dependent and release dependent within one database. This makes database replication impossible for the use with non-SAP systems and even for the replication between SAP Systems you have to make sure that all systems are running on the same SAP release and the same database release of a single database vendor. Furthermore, with database replication you cannot do things like field conversions or version changes. ALE does not have these shortcomings because it offers application driven data replication independent of the underlying database.

Another technology, distributed databases, is no alternative for ALE at the moment, either. There are some good results of distributed databases available, but the performance is far from sufficient for using it with larger applications like SAP.

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