My business is moving to cloud Kinetic very soon, and we are considering the replicated database. This will give us SQL-level access to our data (in Azure SQL) instead of calling APIs on the live system.
My need is make the SQL call from a cloud-based SaaS platform, querying the data from the replicated database, then we can ingest that data into other systems to feed our corporate analytics.
Epicor hasn’t been able to get me any whitepapers on the topic. So I’m asking this community for their take on the topic -
For those actively using the replicated database, what’s it been like for you?
is change latency acceptable (how long before a data change shows in the replica)
performance latency - is it consistent, do you get variable performance from factors out of your control (beyond your own network speeds etc)
allowed IPs: for those reading with cloud SaaS products (not in your own network), what’s it like to get multiple IPs/ports in the allow list?
are the replica’s tables an exact match of the ERP tables in every way (fields, data types, indexes)? Does Epicor add any fields (like a sync timestamp)?
what’s been your challenges or unexpecteds, the things you discovered along the way on how it really works?
We use this but I can’t answer most of your questions. Surprisingly I use it almost never because its so much trouble to have to rdp into a server that is whitelisted, and then preface every call with the ENTIRE string of the sql instance, port number, and database name. Its actually way more work than just writing a BAQ (really). We do use it to feed an external BI system and nobody complains about the data being out of date. One of the major gaps is you don’t get the ssrs database, which would be useful for report writing, you only get the main database. Another major gap is its only production, so you can’t use it for testing stuff because there is no replication from pilot from any other environment.
We are not live yet, but I have tested several reports using it.
is change latency acceptable (how long before a data change shows in the replica)
I was very surprised with this. There does not seem to be any delay at all. I tried to have a report open then changed something in Kinetic and save. Then running the report at once retrieves the new info at once.
performance latency - is it consistent,
It seems to be consistent to us.
are the replica’s tables an exact match of the ERP tables in every way
The only change that I have found is that the UD table is not linked automatically.
for example OrderDtl has to be linked to OrderDtl_ud using SysRowID from OrderDtl to ForeignSysRowID in OrderDtl_UD.
I created a connection string to use with ODBC and that allowed me to use Crystal Reports without much change.
I downloaded the standard odbc Microsoft SQL driver and created macro’s in Excel that retreive data straight from the tables.
If you are going to pull BAQ data into Excel then use the get data in Excel to pull using Odata feeds. That works good also.
I can test it from home to see if it needs to be from the Office IP. From my Office I just run Excel. From Home, I am always connected by VPN and RDP and run the Excel on the office computer.