When it comes to managing the immense amount of data that your business has gathered over the years of its operation, you want to make sure that the solutions you use can give you the results you need as soon as you need it. Especially when said data is key to your operations.
After all, with today’s hyper-competitive business world, you either keep up with the rest of the players or surpass them, or get left behind and bite the dust. If you’re looking to stay current and get ahead of your competitors, then change data capture is something that you should consider adopting your data management solutions.
What is Change Data Capture?
Change data capture (CDC) is a specific design pattern in data management that, as its name implies, captures individual changes made in your main database. These range from minor changes like updating a specific document to bigger tasks like an entire batch of file uploads, or even more encompassing ones like file restructuring.
Because CDC only deals with the changes made, it allows for a faster and more adept updating and replication process of any secondary databases that are slaved to your main databases. This is especially true when it comes to log-based change data capture.
Here’s an example scenario where change data capture is essential: Let’s say that you own a shipping company that deals in long-haul nautical shipping, where keeping track of schedules and inventory is paramount to profitability. As such, it’s imperative that your database is perfectly replicated among your main on-shore office and on your freight ships.
By using change data capture, you avoid the long latency periods involved with traditional data replication solutions, i.e., dumping your main database to your off-shore databases each time an update is needed. Because only the changes to the data are streamed, slave databases are updated as close to real-time as bandwidth allows. In the context of freight shipping, this helps avoid unexpected delays and unpredictable course corrections by constantly updating ship databases with weather reports, estimated time of arrivals, and other up-to-date information necessary for expedient travel.
The above is only a theoretical example, as change data capture is often used for data warehouses. However, any database can easily take advantage of change data capture.
How Does CDC Change The Way We Deal With Data?
Change data capture can truly change the way everyone deals with data, especially in the business/enterprise sector. Instead of simply being information stored and locked away for prosperity or legal purposes, data can be used to actually foster business growth by facilitating real-time business intelligence as well as making replication efforts more efficient and agile.
To sum up, here are some of the more concrete benefits of change data capture:
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It delivers data on-demand and in near-real time
Because only the changes in a master database are used to update other databases connected to it, the replication happens faster. This allows data requests to be achieved quickly and efficiently. In turn, this helps speed up business operations that require quick turnarounds on data requests.
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It helps enhance business intelligence
By allowing enterprises to get their data queries faster, analytic efforts that can contribute greatly to business intelligence are also made more efficient. As such, the enterprise is better equipped to make key decisions that could help business and operational growth.
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It eliminates the need for batch windows
Traditional solutions require batch windows that not only take up more time but also keep the databases concerned unavailable. With CDC, the changes are processed while the underlying systems are kept working.
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It saves resources
CDC can drastically reduce IT operational costs and server bandwidth, as well as costs related to system and storage requirements.
By adopting change data capture into your data management solutions, you can reap these valuable business benefits while at the same time monetizing your data. This can facilitate the growth of your company, your assets, and your employees. Consider CDC as a data management solution if you haven’t yet already.
