What are the differences between database synchronization and database replication?
A. Database synchronization is closely related to database replication. In fact, sometimes people use the terms interchangeably. However, there are big differences, understanding which will help us understand the different approaches used for solving replication and synchronization problems. Replication is mostly used in situations where identical replicas of the complete data set are maintained on two or more database instances for high availability and performance reasons. Database instances can often work independently as backups for each other. The relationships between the instances are equal, symmetric. Normally the number of DB instances is small. On the other hand, in a database synchronization system, typically you have a big central database on the server side and a large number of small databases each residing on a device. The central database contains data for all the devices while each device’s local database only contains the device’s private data and some shared data. In
