In addition to defining the synchronization data map, you will need to develop the synchronization policies, or business rules, that will allow the automatic synchronization to take appropriate action in response to synchronization errors, duplicate entries, or conflicts between the two databases.
Understand what data you will need to log and audit both for the intitial synchronization and for the ongoing operation of your data sync process.
Your middleware should log, at minimum, each synchronization session ID, the start and end times for the session, the primary keys of all records uploaded and downloaded during the session, and each record operation status.
If practical, you should also consider logging all web service requests and responses between your middleware and Luminate Online Web Services.
Luminate Online Web Services operations generate an audit trail of records that were uploaded and downloaded as part of each sync session. Sync sessions may vary greatly in size, from zero records to millions (the latter would occur for a large site doing a complete sync of most or all of their constituent records).
We retain this audit data for either the last 20 sync sessions, or for all sync sessions initiated in the last three months, whichever is greater. We will purge older sync session audit data on a nightly basis.
You should determine in advance the process to be followed for different types of synchronization failure. Generally speaking, it should be safe to re-run a failed synchronization if the synchronization process guards against against duplicate entries. However,your process and policies should guard against skipping or reordering synchronization sessions, as out-of-sequence operations on the two databases can omit data or introduce collisions.
Your policy and systems should designate which database is the database of record, and allow for "ab initio" re-synchronization of data from the master database to the duplicate database in the event that coordination of database state between the two databases is ever lost due to a synchronization failure.
Your system may need to implement policies for notifying you or a system administrator, for example by email, in the event of certain failures.