Advantages of data replication

The advantages of data replication do not come without a cost. Data replication obviously requires more storage, and updating replicated data can take more processing time than updating a single object.

You can implement data replication in the logic of client applications by explicitly specifying where data must be updated. However, this method of achieving data replication is costly, prone to error, and difficult to maintain. Instead, the concept of data replication is often coupled with replication transparency. Replication transparency is built into a database server (instead of into client applications) to handle automatically the details of locating and maintaining data replicas.