Candidate for replication?

I've got a project that will require making a read-only copy of our production database available to a new web-based system. The production database is Oracle8 (soon to be 8i); it consists of about 40 reference tables, which would tend to be fairly static, and about 60 data tables, about 30 of which would be used by the new web app, and which would be updated often. If I understand replication (snapshots) correctly, the replication is done on a table-by-table basis (I have to write a scripts for each table).

Is this situation a good candidate for replication, or should I just create an automatic process to export from the production db each night and import a fresh copy into the read-only db daily? How fast would the replication scripts run once the initial copy is set up (i.e., is speed a consideration with this number of tables)?

Are there any other considerations of snapshots I'm not considering? I think I remember something about indexing not being supported on the replica???

Thanks,
Harry Boswell Received on Thu Oct 04 2001 - 15:54:56 CDT