What is Fivetran HVR? Everything We Know

In the modern business landscape, data drives innovation and efficiency. Gone are the days when data could be stored in just one place. Today’s world demands that data be updated and synchronized in real-time across systems, platforms, and time zones. To keep everything in sync without downtime, businesses rely on tools like Fivetran HVR for seamless data replication.

Imagine you’re a data analyst at a multinational bank. Banks must handle countless transactions across different countries. For instance, a fund transfer initiated in London needs to reflect instantly across systems in other locations. From fraud detection to financial reporting, any delay in syncing data could lead to compliance violations. That’s where Fivetran HVR steps in — ensuring that every transaction is replicated across systems immediately, maintaining real-time accuracy and trust.

Fivetran HVR Architecture

HVR hub

This acts like the brain of the operation. From managing connections to tracking data movements, the entire replication logic lies here. The hub can be installed on-premises or in the cloud, depending on your setup.

Source and target locations

The source is your typical operational databases, like SQL Server or Oracle, where your data originates. The target can be any cloud data warehouse, such as Snowflake or BigQuery, where the data needs to be delivered. HVR uses log-based Change Data Capture (CDC) to track the updates and replicate them in the destination, ensuring real-time data sync. 

CDC

You might wonder how real-time data replication is possible if you have to query an entire table every minute, or even every second, which can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. 

To save time and be more efficient, HVR taps directly into the database’s transaction logs to capture only the changes, such as inserts, updates, and deletes, as they happen. This approach maintains full transactional integrity while placing minimal load on the source system. 

Changes are captured in the exact order they occur, ensuring consistency when they’re applied to the target system. HVR supports Change Data Capture (CDC) across multiple platforms, including Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and SAP HANA.

Channel

Now that we’ve captured changes through CDC, we need a blueprint to define how data should flow from the source to the target, and that’s where HVR’s channel comes in. 

A channel is a logical pipeline that contains all the instructions for replication. Starting from which transformations to apply to where the data should land, it has all the required instructions. It orchestrates the data movement between source and target systems, ensuring accuracy, consistency, and reliability throughout the process. It controls data movement between source and target systems, ensuring accuracy and consistency are maintained. Channels can handle one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many, and many-to-one replication setups.

HVR agent

Take banking, for example. For security and compliance reasons, their production databases are always behind strict firewalls. These databases already handle thousands of transactions per second. Monitoring, log reading, and network compression can lead to extra load on them which impacts performance for end users. 

In such cases, the HVR agent can be placed close to the source database. It reads the transaction logs locally and encrypts the data and pushes it to the cloud securely.

Execution and Runtime Architecture of HVR 

HVR scheduler

Fivetran HVR includes a built-in scheduler and monitoring system that helps manage and track the entire replication process with precision. Whether you need timed batch loads or continuous real-time synchronization, the scheduler lets you automate tasks and control when and how data moves between systems.

For monitoring purposes, HVR has a command line interface and web-based UI that tracks logs, job statuses and alerts about delays or failures. This visibility is essential in business settings where data integrity and uptime are critical.

Log files

HVR generates log files to record detailed information about what’s happening during replication, like changes captured, errors, retries, and performance stats. They’re critical for troubleshooting, auditing, and ensuring data accuracy. Log files live on the hub or agent machines and can be accessed via UI or command line.

Jobs

Jobs are the actual execution units. They perform tasks like “Capture”, “Integrate”, and “Compare”. Each job can be scheduled to run automatically or triggered manually. HVR tracks the status, history, and results of these jobs, allowing you to monitor progress and detect failures.

Router files

Router files define how data should move through the channel, especially when you have multiple sources or targets. They contain mapping instructions, filters, and transformation rules, acting like a traffic controller for replication. It helps determine which tables go where, and how.

Real-World Benefits of HVR’s Architecture

• With CDC in place, HVR offloads strain on source systems by capturing only changed data and replicating it in real-time
• HVR’s modular design easily handles everything from small-scale data replication to large-scale, multi-terabyte operations.
• With built-in data compression, encryption, and scheduling, HVR ensures data is transferred efficiently and securely across systems.
• HVR’s architecture can handle schema changes, high traffic, or other disruptions with minimal downtime, keeping your systems running smoothly.
• By eliminating data silos and enabling real-time access to accurate data, HVR helps organizations make quicker, better-informed decisions.
• HVR allows seamless data replication across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid systems, supporting complex infrastructures.

Conclusion

Fivetran’s HVR  is a versatile and scalable solution built to meet the evolving demands of modern data infrastructure. It enables seamless data replication across on-premises and cloud systems, as well as between different cloud platforms, giving organizations the flexibility they need in hybrid environments. 

With its high-performance engine, HVR can replicate large volumes of data at impressive speed while maintaining data accuracy and consistency. Designed with enterprise needs in mind, it offers scalability to support growing datasets, reliability to ensure continuous uptime, and built-in security features to protect data in transit. As data continues to fuel business innovation, HVR stands out as a robust, future-ready replication solution that helps organizations stay connected, agile, and insight-driven.

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