Oracle GoldenGate buddies up with sibling software
The new version of Oracle GoldenGate, a database replication technology the company acquired in 2009, enjoys the benefits of some in-house integration with other Oracle software.
The new Oracle GoldenGate 11g Release 2, now available, can pull data directly from the Oracle database engine, rather than by using external logs. Also, administrators for the first time can control GoldenGate operations through the Oracle Enterprise Manager.
“For an Oracle customer who is considering the product, the integrated capture with the Oracle database is a huge win,” said Brad Adelberg, Oracle vice president of development, of the new version of GoldenGate.
GoldenGate software replicates the contents of a relational database onto another database system, updating the copied database with changes as they occur in the original dataset, a process known as change data capture (CDC). The software is tuned to keep up with heavily used, mission-critical databases, OLTP (online transactional processing databases) in particular.
The replicated database can then be used for a variety of purposes. It can be used as a backup in a disaster recovery plan, or be mined for near-real-time business analysis or richer operational reporting, minimizing the impact such reporting would have on the original database. The duplicated database can be a staging area for bulk data moves to a data warehouse by way of ETL (extract transform and load) software, again minimizing the operational load against source database.
GoldenGate could also be used to facilitate load balancing, where two or more identical databases can share the workload. GoldenGate can also post database changes on a messaging system, where it can be ingested by third-party software.
Customers tend to use GoldenGate in all these ways, with no one use being predominant, Adelberg said, noting that once the technology is deployed for one function, the organization may then find other uses as well. “It doesn’t solve just one problem, it is a very flexible technology,” Adelberg said.
A number of large corporations and transaction-intensive Web services, including Bank of America, Sabre Holdings, Travelocity and Overstock.com, use GoldenGate.
GoldenGate 11g Release 2 benefits from some in-house engineering. This is the first version of the product that can grab data changes directly from the Oracle database engine, the software underlying a database management system (DBMS) that updates the data in a database. Previously, the software monitored the Oracle database redo log, which documented database changes after they occurred.
Talking directly with the Oracle databases, a feature Adelberg called “integrated capture,” offers GoldenGate some advantages, he said.
