Mirror data storage across geo distributions

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    dev

    Hello Ben,

    Thank you for your feedback. 

    Initially, when we just started working on geo distribution feature this was exactly the way we were going to use. But when we started investigating if database replication technology suits our solution and it appeared that this works better for clear reporting systems where data is loaded and isn't changed too much. But in our case, the data is being created and updated constantly - users always track time, create tacks manually, or edit them.

    It means that the data should be created and changed in a single database for all world which is slow if the user is in another part of the world. And then it will be automatically mirrored to other databases and can be read from there. But the replication (mirroring) doesn't work instantly, so there might be delays between data creating and appearing in UI which is unacceptable in our product.

    Another approach with creating/updating data in the closest database would inevitably lead to change conflicts if, for example, the one track was edited differently by two users from different locations (so in different databases). It would break database replication immediately.

    One more point against using data mirroring is that 7pace Timetracker is not a stand-alone application. It is tightly integrated to Azure DevOps which doesn't mirror its data. Your DevOps data is stored and processed in a location chosen when you created your organization. 

    7pace Timetracker constantly uses DevOps APIs, makes requests to it to keep a high level of integration. It means that even if 7pace Timetracker data center is located close to a worker, it still might be slow if DevOps data center is far from there. So it doesn't make sense to keep your Timetracker data closer to users, it's much more important to keep it closer to your DevOps. This is described in our geo-distribution article.

    So finally we chose the solution which works better in our case according to all the described reasons. We might review it in the future, but changing the current approach is not on our roadmap now.

    Thanks for using 7pace Timeracker.

    Kind regards,

    Roman

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    Ben Troop

    Thanks so much for the detailed explanation Roman. It's a bummer that the functionality isn't there, but we very much understand the limitations you are facing. Appreciate you getting back to us!

     

    -Ben

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