With SQL Server 2005 Beta 2 out the door, it's time to start sharing information on the upcoming features.  One of the big features I've been working on the past three years is Heterogeneous Replication.  Put simply, Oracle is a fully supported publisher for SQL Server 2005 Replication.  I'm going to share some general overview information over the next few weeks.

So, what is it and why should you care?  Basically, if you have an Oracle server that you want to serve data to SQL Server subscribers, this feature is for you.  The integration of Oracle support is really deep.  We have tried very hard to make Oracle publishers look just like SQL Server publishers.  We support Oracle publishers for transactional and snapshot replication (no merge).  Before everyone asks me, merge wasn't a target mostly because we didn't feel it fit the typical Oracle scenario (i.e. large legacy Oracle servers) and it would have been just that much more work to get it in.  We'll definitely consider it for post-2005 releases but the scope of just tran/snapshot was more than enough for this release.

The new SQL Server 2005 Workbench has full support for Oracle publishers so you can pretty much point and click your way through.  For those of you that roll up your sleeves, most of the replication API stored procedures have a new parameter (@publisher) that is only used for Oracle.  Subscribers barely even know they are dealing with Oracle data.  Once the data is in the distributor, it looks no different than data that originally came from SQL Server.

The release in SQL Server 2005 Beta 2 is pretty much feature complete.  I'm spending most of my time now between bug fixes and some performance rewrites.  But you should be able to start investigating scenarios now with the beta.

Future posts will cover suggested scenarios and the architecture in some detail.