Enterprise Replication

My company is organized as follows:

1 - Corporate Office (CO)
3 – Regional Offices (RO) which reports to CO. 60 – Local Offices (LO) each on reports to its designated RO.

Each office has an NT server with an Oracle 8 database. On a scheduled basis, a dial-up RAS connection is made between each LO and the RO to which they report. Also each RO is connected on schedule to the CO.

Our goal is to provide each office in the hierarchy with a consolidated and/or individual view of the data at the offices “below” it. For instance, the CO and each RO should have a view of their own data and the data of those offices which report to it, in both an separate and/or consolidated presentation.

Assume that each office contains an identical schema and there is never a continuous WAN connection.

I have two question:

1. Is it possible, using mechanisms in Oracle, to have a copy of each LO database at its “parent”; then, during the scheduled communication, have the LO data automatically replicated at the RO to which it belongs?
2. At the CO and RO, can Oracle provide a consolidated and/or disparate “view” of the replicated LO databases to reporting and query tools?

A few minor details…Is this hard? Is it practical? Is there a better/alternate way to provide both disparate and consolidated views of Oracle 8 data for an Enterprise that does not have a continuous WAN connection?

TIA,
Rob Linton Received on Mon Nov 02 1998 - 13:26:39 CST