Prior to embarking on my quest to develop a database replication mechanism in Perl, I thought I'd tap the collective wisdom of my fellow monks. Basically, I need a reliable and manageable database replication mechanism for implementing a hub-and-spoke topology using merge replication. I'm currently using SQL Sever 2k replication, but find it has some holes and lacks any real management features.

• The database is temporal in nature, and conflict resolution is not a big issue
• Typically have about 100 sites (spokes) per hub
• Data size is about 1MB per replication, sometimes over slow dial-up connections
• Since opening firewalls requires work, HTTP tunneling might be worth considering
• Currently all databases are SQL Server 2k, but I will need to include Oracle soon
• Must be secure
• Management of the overall replication process is important (IMO as important as the replication mechanism itself)

Due to the temporal nature of the database, it is possible to decouple replication from the database. That is, it would be possible to use a messaging scheme that would replicate the data and have a separate mechanism for handling database loading as well routing messages from the hub to the appropriate spokes.

Any design insights or pointers to useful modules is appreciated.