Architecture design to support global data replication

Hi,
In our global company, there is a proposal to have SQL Server hubs at
specific locations, say one in North America (NA) and the other in Asia (wit
h
scalability option that other hubs could be added as our company grows).
With this mind, we are in the process of designing a strategy to support
bi-directional (and may be 3-way or X number of way in the future)
transactional replication of our PORTAL database between NA and Asia so that
any changes made in the DB in NA server is reflected to the DB in the Asia
server and vice versa. NA server will be used by NA clients and the Asia
server, by Asian clients.
Any ideas what would be the best strategy to implement this, keeping
latency, network speed, and most importantly choice of replication method in
mind? The PORTAL database is designed to be less than 15 GB.
Your thoughts and comments are appreciated. TIA.I would recommend transactional replication. It if it two way replication I
would use bi-directional transactional replication. With careful filtering
you should be able to scale this to several more nodes.
Peer-to-peer replication is also an option in SQL 2005, however all updates
should originate on one node.
Merge can be used, but it adds latency to each DML.
Hilary Cotter
Looking for a SQL Server replication book?
http://www.nwsu.com/0974973602.html
Looking for a FAQ on Indexing Services/SQL FTS
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"Rob" <Rob@.discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:C84C50BF-571D-4F43-BBB7-BF81BE06E34F@.microsoft.com...
> Hi,
> In our global company, there is a proposal to have SQL Server hubs at
> specific locations, say one in North America (NA) and the other in Asia
> (with
> scalability option that other hubs could be added as our company grows).
> With this mind, we are in the process of designing a strategy to support
> bi-directional (and may be 3-way or X number of way in the future)
> transactional replication of our PORTAL database between NA and Asia so
> that
> any changes made in the DB in NA server is reflected to the DB in the Asia
> server and vice versa. NA server will be used by NA clients and the Asia
> server, by Asian clients.
> Any ideas what would be the best strategy to implement this, keeping
> latency, network speed, and most importantly choice of replication method
> in
> mind? The PORTAL database is designed to be less than 15 GB.
> Your thoughts and comments are appreciated. TIA.