We have a "master" application in our organization with a "master" database that contains the majority of the information that our organization depends on.
Then we have another "side" application that has its own database schema, but requires the data that is stored in the master database for operation.
At the moment, every night we run a job that brings in the data from the master database to the "side" database.
Needless to say, this has resulted in lots of headache and has degraded our productivity substantially.
I have made some research and it looks like that using heterogenous data replication it is possible to share the data between the two database in a real-time fashion, but I am not an expert in this area.
So my question is what are some of the best practices for sharing data between two heterogenous databases (in our case, the DBs are SQL Server 2008).