The Many Uses of Oracle GoldenGate

In today’s competitive business environment commercial software applications need to be always available to customers, suppliers, partners, and employees. Continuous availability of application functionality and real-time business intelligence are no longer just buzzwords; they are the end-result scenarios that businesses are working toward achieving and optimizing every day.

That’s just one aspect of the overall picture — interfacing businesses with their users, customers and suppliers. Another important backend or internal requirement for businesses is to analyze and act upon information — making decisions in real or near-real time.

Needless to say, technology in general and software tools in particular play a critical and indispensable role in achieving the above-mentioned twin objectives:

• Ensuring continued availability of application functionality
• Making decisions with minimum latency

One of these tools is Oracle GoldenGate. It’s a platform that enables replication of transactional data from a single source or multiple sources to a single target or multiple targets in real time, with low overhead on existing OLTP systems.

The platform’s defining characteristic is that it has a modular architecture and loosely coupled components. This architecture allows DBAs to configure the platform in various topologies. If you want an overview of the topologies, please refer to our blog post titled, Configuration Options in Oracle GoldenGate, or download Datavail’s recently released white paper, GoldenGate: A Solution to Issues of Space and Latency.

Another advantage of the underlying architecture is that Oracle GoldenGate is source- and target-agnostic. In other words, the platform allows for replication between heterogeneous sources and targets.

Even though it’s an Oracle product, it is not straight-jacketed by Oracle databases, as it stages data in trail files that decouple source and targets. GoldenGate is versatile as the source, and targets can be varied.

Let us mention some of the platforms that can be integrated with Oracle GoldenGate:

• Oracle and non-Oracle Databases such as MySQL, IBM DB2, MS SQL, Sybase and others
•  Flat Files, XML, JSON, CSV files and other unstructured data sources
• Big Data-based data reservoirs based on technologies such as Apache Hive, Apache HDFS, and Apache Hadoop
• Java Messaging Service (JMS) and Java API

The fact that Oracle GoldenGate can target formats such as XML, JSON and CSV provides users with the flexibility to configure and output data to a host of other applications. To quote from DatabaseJournal.com, “Another neat feature of GoldenGate is that it practically couldn’t care less which database system you’re coming from or going to.”

Keeping in mind the multiplicity of sources and targets that GoldenGate can support – most of us can imagine the numerous uses and applications for GoldenGate. But let’s first talk about Big Data.

Oracle GoldenGate and Big Data

Most are familiar with the three underlying characteristics of Big Data — the three Vs of Big Data:

• Velocity
• Volume
• Variety

One of the major challenges in creating Big Data-based repositories is harvesting data from the numerous and varied formats, structures, and sources. Oracle GoldenGate and Oracle Data Integrator support a host of Big Data sources. This makes it possible for Big Data ETL developers to easily harvest data from diverse sources into Big Data reservoirs.

A few other important uses and applications of Oracle GoldenGate are outlined below.

Oracle GoldenGate and OLAP Systems (Data Warehouses)

IT Teams and ETL developers can feed OLAP systems with real-time data from OLTP systems without unduly affecting database and application performance.

Oracle GoldenGate and Data Migration

One of the standard uses of the product is to migrate data from Oracle to non-Oracle databases and vice versa.

Oracle GoldenGate and Data Updates

With Oracle GoldenGate, the need to schedule for planned outages during which production databases can be updated is minimized. It’s possible to create a temporary or secondary database that can be used when the production database is updated. This results in continued availability of database systems to end users and a seamless update process.

Oracle GoldenGate and Query Offloading, Reporting and Testing Databases

Running reports from production servers can result in processing overhead that may influence the throughput of transactions that run on OLTP systems. With Oracle GoldenGate, it is possible to offload tables, schemas or materialized views to temporary targets that can be used for running reports.

Oracle GoldenGate and Load Balancing

Oracle GoldenGate provides highest availability and maximum performance by continuously moving and synchronizing data between two or more active databases in a multi-master configuration.

Oracle GoldenGate’s modular design, supported topologies, and performance characteristics combine to make it an extremely powerful tool that can be used in a number of use case scenarios Download our white paper, GoldenGate: A Solution to Issues of Space and Latency, for further insights – including client success stories – into this versatile platform.