sync data from remote SQL Server to local server - sql-server

Question

I have read only access to 2 SQL Server databases used by our company's primary application. For reporting and testing purposes, I would like to sync the databases to 2 databases i have on prem at our corporate offices. Because it's a hosted application on azure, replication is not an option. I want to run queries against both databases. I can query one at a time but cant query both.
I can link to one server via ssms with linked servers but not both because the have the same server name. odbc ,ight be a solution for that but we will see.
The issue here is I want to run a task that copies the data from the hosted sql server to the local server without replication as an option.
I have access to sql Server 2012 and sql Server 2019 if that matters.
I can link to one server via ssms with linked servers but not both, because the have the same server name. odbc ,ight be a solution for that but we will see.
The issue here is I want to run a task that copies the data from the hosted sql server to the local server without replication as an option.
I have access to sql Server 2012 and sql Server 2019 if that matters.

Answer 1

I have done manual synchronization tasks before. For example, our phone system has a large call log table in MySQL and I periodically have to replicate that over to a SQL server used for reporting. I basically create a synchronization log table to record when the last synchronization occured. Each time the stored procedure is run, it grabs all records between the last synchronization and now. You can expand this example to multiple tables to synch (i.e. you can add server_name and table_name columns to db_synch_log and servers).
The problem I see is that you want to replicate an entire DB. If you're updating more than just a few tables, this method is not scalable IMO. For my purposes, I was replicating 3 tables and nothing else.
--You need a log table to record when the last synchronization was performed.
CREATE TABLE db_synch_log (
last_synch_date datetime;
);
--Create variables to hold the last_synch and current datetimes.
DECLARE #run_date datetime = GETDATE();
DECLARE #last_run_date datetime;
--Get the last run date from the log table;
SET #last_run_date = (SELECT MAX(last_synch_date) FROM db_synch_log);
--Get all records from remote database between last run time an this run.
INSERT INTO myTable (column1Name, column2Name, ...)
SELECT column1Name, column2Name, ...
FROM remoteserver.dbo.myTableRemote as rt
WHERE rt.date_created > #last_run_date
AND rt.date_created <= #run_date
;
--Update synch log.
INSERT INTO db_synch_log (last_synch_date)
SELECT #run_date
;