Designing a data exchange

The way that you design your exchange scheme depends on how often you want to run the process and which data you want to have at each site.

If your data changes often and must be kept up-to-date, you must schedule frequent updates so that you have a near real-time environment. On the other hand, you might want to schedule less frequent updates if keeping communication costs down is important to you.

If your data only needs to be updated in the event of predictable changes, you can schedule the exchange accordingly. For example, if the stock data only changes when an inventory control is done at the end of the month, you only need to run an exchange after the inventory control is performed.

For less frequent changes, or if the changes are not predictable, you can also perform the exchange on demand instead of on a fixed schedule.

Not all sites require updates of all data, and you can minimize your communication costs by exactly specifying the data to be exchanged. For example, all bank sites must have up-to-date currency exchange rates, but not all sites must have all the customer data for the entire bank.