Replication: Best Practice for multiple on-prem and one cloud DB

[LavanyaVasudevanNES]

Hello Everyone, 

I am looking for some best practice and gotchas to get replication working effectively between two different on-prem databases and one cloud.  On-prem DatabaseA needs to two way replicate with on-CLOUD DatabaseB and DatabaseB replicate(2-way) with a completely different on-prem DatabaseC.   This is to make sure DatabaseA and DatabaseC are in sync in their respective locations.  Looking at building this on traditional versioning and at ArcGIS Enterprise 11.3.  

I am thinking if for any reason replications breaks, we will need to build two replications to fix the issue.   Would it be better to get everyone to edit on-CLOUD DatabaseB and just do a one way from cloud to DatabaseA and DatabaseC?

Any help is greatly appreciated.  

[VinceAngelo]

It's not clear what your use case is. Generally, I'd be wary of unnecessary 2-way replicas. Editing a single parent geodatabase and sharing it with two parent-to-child one-way replicas is the simplest (and most common) data model available, far easier than two two-way replicas.

ArcGIS 11.3 is somewhat elderly at this point, so if you're only starting now, I'd recommend using something more recent.  Maybe not the brand new stuff, but certainly the most recent patch to the stable release before that (which in this case would be ArcGIS 12.0/Pro 3.6.4, or ArcGIS 11.5/Pro 3.5.7, depending on your view of .0 releases).

- V

[LavanyaVasudevanNES]

Vince, 

Thank you for your response.  ArcGIS Enterprise 11.3 unfortunately is dependent on integrations with Cityworks version and we are unable to move to anything higher than that at the moment.   ClientA and ClientC are needing to replicate because they share the same NG911 datasets amoungst other datasets.  We have decided to do the following for the moment because neither of the clients are ready to explore Branch versioning and to get away from replication.  DatabaseA will replicate with DatabaseB on the cloud.  DatabaseC will replicate with DatabaseA directly making DatabaseA the authoritative database.  

[VinceAngelo]

There are several ways to implement replication, among them:

1. Log shipping from a parent database to a read-only replica,
2. ArcGIS geodatabase replication, and
3. Application-based change detection/management.

It's not clear if you are using 1 or 2, and if 2, whether it is one-way or two-way. That said, I've used all three successfully with ArcGIS, including additional variants like standby replicas. You can also combine these (e.g., both 1 & 2, or 3 & 1 where the map services are hosted from the read-only replica).

- V