Chapter 1. What Is Oracle Streams

Businesses operating in a distributed environment typically maintain several databases instead of one large data store. As a result, sharing data between the distributed databases and applications becomes a necessity. Applications and users expect access to the data in near real time. Over a period of time, businesses find themselves using a variety of products and customized applications to share the information. Oracle Streams provides the single information sharing solution.

Simply put, Oracle Streams is the managed flow of information. This information flow can be from one application to another, one database to another, within the same application, or within the same database. The applications and databases can be on the same machine or can be far apart. The databases can all be Oracle databases with different Oracle releases, different platforms (homogeneous environment), or a combination of Oracle and non-Oracle databases such as DB2 or Microsoft SQL-Server (heterogeneous environment).