Replication is the mechanism through which a separate copy of the database instance is made to create the distributed database environment.

It is considered as an easy and minimum risk process as the information is copied from one instance to another without a logical separation. Also, each of the individual nodes having the complete information, is more efficient in accessing the information without having network traversals and reduces the risk of network security.

However, it consumes more storage space having a replica of the entire information from each of the node at all the other nodes, and it takes longer to sync all the nodes when the information across all the nodes needs to be updated.

Snapshots that pull a real-time replication for each transaction are some of the techniques used in data replication.