My team and I are developing a program for a bank and need to synchronize data with an existing system that is deployed on the internal network of the bank's clients. Any update made to the data in our system should be replicated to their system and vice-versa. The database used by our system is Oracle 11g and the existing system used Oracle 10g. We had initially considered using web services for this but the developers of the existing system don't want to build the web services. So we are left with the option of using database links to synchronize data.
- What are the pros and cons of using database links to replicate data?
- Since it's a banking application handling monetary transactions, how do we encrypt the data sent across the networks?