What Is Replication in Databases?

Introduction

Replication is copying data from a host machine to multiple destination machines connected via a network. Basically, replication is the process of storing data in more than one place. Every node that stores a copy of the data is called a replica.

These are the advantages of replication:

• High availability: By storing the copies of data in multiple host machines, the database is resilient to individual host machines' failures and can safely redirect the reads and writes to live host machines.

• Load distribution: The database can redistribute the read and write queries to multiple host machines, thus preventing the load on single host machines.

• Reduced latency: The replicated host machines can be placed geographically closer to the user, thus reducing the latency on the end user.

Types of replication

There are a number of different types of replication:

• Full replication

• Transactional replication

• Snapshot replication

• Merge replication

• Key-based incremental replication

Full replication

Full replication is where we replicate the complete data from one host machine to another. This ...