I've got a problem with a new requirement from the developers.

We work in Pharmaceuticals and the validation/QA requirements and restrictions mean that any changes to a production system have to be absolutely critical before we expend any great effort and cost doing them. And tehn we spend months re-validating the system ...

Anyway ... we have a production database and our developers want it to automatically update a second database. We can't create triggers in the Production Database due to the QA restrictions.

I've tried to think laterally and have created a link from the new Database (DB2) to the production database (DB1).

I tried creating a trigger in DB2 that fired when a table in DB1 was updated. I wasn't sure whether this was possible but gave it a go anyway. The triggering statement was that AFTER INSERT ON tablename@db_link_name(DB1)
FOR EACH ROW
BEGIN
INSERT INTO table_in_DB2 ... etc

This trigger creation failed with ORA-02021: DDL operations are not allowed on a remote database.

Now I know this error can be caused by a variety of things and occurs for other reasons.

Is what I am attempting intrinsically wrong (ie) impossible?

I wasn't convinced it was possible when I started so can someone convince me either way? Or suggest an alternative?

I'm running 8.1.5 by the way