We have developed an enterprise level application using OutSystems. As with any application of that size, it collects and stores huge amount of data. Performing regular analytics and reporting on the data is crucial to the business to understand the performance of their product. In order for the business to perform these heavy type reporting, a separate database will need to be created which replicates the Production database (as in, a Data Warehouse).
Question is, what are the available strategies from OutSystems to enable database replication? Ideally, we would like to have a read-replica of the production database which lives on a completely separate infrastructure (i.e. on premise) and we need the replication to occur on a daily basis.
Does OutSystems support this? is this something that we can turn ON by contact OutSystems support?
We know that there are plenty of external software that we can utilise to replicate the database, but we are really interested to know if there is any out-of-the-box feature from OutSystems which allows us to replicate the production database into an on-premise database without having to over-engineer a solution.
Input is much appreciated.
Hello Maitham.
The best contact to help you with that is your Account Manager, but here goes my opinion:
If you license is on-premises, it is up to your infratructure team. I'm assuming it is only for analytics (not for OutSystems usage) so a simple copy of the database is enough.
If your server is on the cloud, you need to contact support to get a backup of the DB, but I assume it is not usable except for AWS. And getting daily copies? Forget about it.
So yes, I say you will need a tool to replicate data. No need to use a OS specific tool, but a SQL tool.
I have heard about this tool. Is it related to this case, can it be used?
https://www.outsystems.com/forge/component-overview/2812/data-migration-manager-dmm-performance-advisor-ipa
Regards,
Márcio
Thank you Marcio.
Yes, we will be evaluating this tool and see if it is going to work for us.
Than you Nuno. I will get in touch with our OutSystems solution architect and get his opinion as well to make sure that we have covered all options. I agree with you however, it seems that the only strategy is to use an external tool and the guys on this thread have suggested quite a few for us to consider.
Hi Maitham,
I also had the same use case for one of the enterprise client. OutSystems doesn't provide any straight forward functionality to migrate data between environments. So, we used Data mover tool https://www.outsystems.com/forge/component-overview/5872/cool-data-mover for the same.
Alternatively, manually you need to create and manage SQL scripts (using timers) to migrate data from prod to lower environments on regular intervals.
Thank you Ambar. I have sent an email to the Cool Data Mover guys to get an idea about their pricing and I am still waiting for their response. I need the price in order to represent a case for the business to consider. We will try out their 'free-trial' license for now to see if it is fit for our prupose.
Outsystem does not offer a solution for this itself but through partners. I had a good experience with DMM from Infosystema, you can install and try this application through the Forge. Data Migration Manager (DMM)
Thank you Matthias. We will consider the DMM forge component you mentioned to see it is fit-for-purpose. From reading the Forge page, it looks pretty comprehensive tool but without trying it out first its hard to tell.