Re: Big project, please help

Two way replication on a single "table" is availabe in Lotus Notes. In
Notes, every record has a time-stamp, which contains the time of the
last update. (It also has a creation timestamp.) During replication,
timestamps are compared at the row/record level, and compared with the
timestamp of the last replication. If, for corresponding rows in two
replicas, the timestamp of one row is newer than the last replication,
the contents of this newer row is copied to the other replica. But if
both of the corresponding rows have newer timestamps, there is a
problem. The Lotus Notes solution is to: 1. send a replication conflict message to the Notes Administrator,
which message contains full copies of both rows. 2. copy the newest row over the less new row in the replicas. 3. there
isa mechanism for the Administrator to reverse the default
 
decision in 2, if the semantics of the message history, or off-line
investigation indicates that the wrong decision was made.

In practice, the Administrator is not overwhelmed with replication
conflict messages because updates usually only originate at the site
that originally created the row. Or updates fill only fields that were
originally 'TBD'. The full logic is perhaps more complicated than I have
described here, but it is already complicated enough to give you an idea
of what you're really being asked to do. I am not aware of a supplier of
relational database who really supports two way replication at the level
that Notes supports it, but Notes isn't a relational database.

The difficulty of the position that you appear to be in is that
management might believe that the full problem is solved in brand X
RDBMS, and you will have trouble convincing management that this is not
really true.