Publications and subscriptions control the data flow and the schedule of data publication or data consumption. An application can be a publisher and a subscriber. Multiple applications can publish to the same topic. Multiple applications can consume data from the same topic.

You can use automatic, custom, and modular publications and subscriptions to publish data and to consume data.

You can publish from and subscribe to different sources of data. Because the publishing process and the consuming process are completely decoupled, the publishing source and the consuming target do not have to be of the same data type. For example, you can publish data from a file and consume it into a database.

Automatic publications and subscriptions can publish from and subscribe to a relational database, a file, or a cloud application, or over a REST API.

Custom publications and subscriptions can publish from and subscribe to on-premises applications.

Modular publications and subscriptions can publish from and subscribe to cloud applications.