One of the most valuable assets of any modern day organization or enterprise is its business and consumer data.
It is data which drives processes, operations, applications, services and experiences for consumers, businesses and employees.
Be it user records or business transactions, the value of data is only when it is accurate, up-to-date and consistent across systems.
When data is inaccurate and inefficient, the quality of insights are hampered and the experience of services offered by a business also suffers negatively.
This is why data replication must be instantaneous to ensure the analytics and insights derived from the data are valuable and effective for decision making.
Traditionally, businesses have relied on legacy infrastructure and on-premise database management solutions which is now giving way to scalable, cloud-based migrations.
Today, more businesses are embracing the shift to innovative, modern solutions to manage, process and analyze data while saving time and reducing inefficiencies.
To ensure real-time data movement, Change Data Capture (CDC) has emerged as an effective way which was introduced by Microsoft SQL server.
Microsoft SQL Server is one of the most innovative, robust and secure solutions for near real-time data replication, management, migration, analytics and data intelligence.
For any business that relies on data for powering applications and providing services at scale, using SQL server CDC can provide tangible positive value and measurable impact.
In this article, you will learn in detail about what makes CDC an extremely useful and powerful solution for your business.
Plus, you will also learn about the reasons why you should consider it for your data pipeline but before that, let’s start with the basics of understanding first.
What is Microsoft SQL Server
SQL server is a flagship relational database from Microsoft which is used for a wide range of data-driven functionalities and processes such as – transactions and analytics.
It works by storing data in a systematic row and column format which is retrieved for real-time data replication and synchronization.
SQL Server is amongst the most reliable, robust and efficient RDBMS solutions used by enterprises and organisations due to its intelligent and fast query processing capability.
What is Change Data Capture SQL server
Change Data Capture (CDC) in SQL is a process for identifying any change, incremental or exponential, occurring in a source database and reflecting the change in a target database.
With CDC, database administrators and managers can easily identify and track any types of changes in real-time and replicate the data changes for applications and decisions.
SQL server CDC tracks data addition, insertion, updation and deletion and captures all data modification occurrences in real-time by storing a log of all the updates and applying the changes to a database table in the destination for consumption by an application.
In high-velocity business environments where massive volumes of data are created, stored and processed continuously, CDC can help businesses move at the speed of change and ensure a real-time, low-latency and scalable data replication.
With CDC SQL server, companies and organizations can easily identify and track data changes from multiple sources including database, applications and cloud based platforms such as Azure, BigQuery, Snowflake and Amazon Redshift.
The ability to instantly track data changes and accurately replicate them to a target destination is a huge boon for generating real-time, data-driven insights.
There are numerous advantages of using Change Data Capture for data replication such as:
- CDC is completely adaptable and cognizant of tracking any changes made in the database, ensuring real-time changes can flow between applications and systems.
- CDC can move bulk data between tables in a synchronous, real-time way which makes it fast and highly efficient.
- CDC is cloud-ready which makes it scalable and flexible for use by various applications and use-cases across networks.
- Change data capture is bandwidth and resource efficient as it works as a single point of source, therefore reducing the data volume transferred over a network.
- CDC is cost-efficient as it loads data incrementally instead of batch processing of data which causes low spikes in bandwidth and reduces data transfer cost.
- Change data capture enables businesses to get access to real-time, instantaneous updates and changes to improve their analysis and make better decisions.
If you want to stay agile and grow in a data-driven business landscape, it is essential to leverage the power of CDC for making better, faster and real-time decisions.
CDC has numerous use-cases beyond change tracking and data replication – businesses also use it for data compliance, reliable auditing and synchronization across systems.
However, to implement CDC in your database and pipeline, you need to invest significant time, resources and technical expertise.
This requires complex custom coding and technical bandwidth, especially because implementing CDC is not based on any pre-built integrations.
Bryteflow for seamless SQL server CDC
Bryteflow offers a no-code, fully automated GUI environment which guarantees blazing fast, real-time and secure data replication from source to target.
Bryteflow does not require admin access or log-based permissions and it works without any advanced coding knowledge or technical expertise.
Experience enterprise grade, seamless server replication and security with Bryteflow.