Product Overview: Qlik Replicate
Qlik Replicate is a robust data replication and integration solution designed to streamline the process of moving, synchronizing, and consolidating data across a wide range of sources and targets. Here’s a detailed look at what the product does and its key features.
What Qlik Replicate Does
Qlik Replicate enables organizations to replicate, synchronize, distribute, consolidate, and ingest data from various sources, including databases, files, mainframe systems, SAP, Salesforce, and more, to multiple targets such as databases, data warehouses, Hadoop, and cloud platforms. This ensures that data is available in real-time, enhancing data availability, accessibility, and system resilience.
Key Features and Functionality
Task Types and Configuration
Qlik Replicate supports several task types to cater to different use cases:
- Unidirectional: Replicates data from one source database to one target database.
- Bidirectional: Updates both source and target databases whenever changes occur in either.
- Log Stream: Saves data changes from the source database and applies them to multiple targets in parallel, reducing the overhead of multiple tasks reading from the same source.
Data Replication Modes
- Full Load: Creates an exact copy of the source database by reading all columns and rows and transferring them to the target database.
- Change Data Capture (CDC): Captures and applies changes (INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE) from the source database to the target in real-time.
- Store Changes: Optionally stores changes in a change or audit table on the target side, capturing before and after images of the data.
Real-Time Integration and Performance
Qlik Replicate supports real-time data integration, enabling live data ingestion for analytics in data lakes or other targets. It can create live Kafka messages for streaming analytics and efficiently compress and transfer data over wide area networks (WAN) to optimize performance.
Security and Compliance
The solution leverages advanced encryption (AES-256, NSA-approved) to ensure secure data transfer across different environments.
Platform Support and Flexibility
Qlik Replicate supports data replication across all major databases, data warehouses, Hadoop, streaming systems, mainframe systems, and cloud platforms. It allows data to be moved across, into, and off all major cloud platforms and service providers, enabling full hybrid mobility.
User Interface and Automation
The product features an intuitive, web-based console that simplifies the configuration, control, and monitoring of replication tasks. It automates end-to-end replication, eliminating the need for manual coding or deep technical knowledge. The interface allows for easy drag-and-drop configuration of sources and targets.
Centralized Management
Qlik Enterprise Manager provides centralized control and monitoring of thousands of Qlik Replicate tasks across distributed data centers and cloud environments. It offers real-time monitoring through KPIs and alerts, and supports integration with microservices architectures via REST and .NET APIs.
Additional Benefits
- High-Performance Data Loading: Ensures transactional consistency in Hadoop targets and supports native APIs for high-performance data loading into data lake ecosystems.
- Data Transformation and Consumption: While Qlik Replicate itself is primarily an ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) tool focused on data replication, it can be used in conjunction with other tools for data transformation and consumption, such as Qlik Compose, Google Dataflow, Informatica, and more.
In summary, Qlik Replicate is a powerful tool for data replication and integration, offering flexibility, real-time capabilities, and robust security, making it an essential solution for organizations seeking to optimize their data pipelines and enhance data-driven decision-making.