Dataloader is an incredible asset for a large organization or an organization that has a robust Salesforce environment. Specifically, Dataloader has allowed our sales team to focus on driving sales while our operations team can load the data they need in a manner that allows for robust reporting and tracking on our sales process. Organizations with less robust Salesforce environments or Salesforce environments in which many people are expected to maintain their own information likely do not need Dataloader.
I think it's a great product. We apply Oracle GoldenGate to several use cases in our organization. 1. Business Continuity Planning, 2. Query Offloading through data replication to a reporting instance of our data, 3. looking into data transformations to help support various queries for different teams within the business.
Extracting Salesforce attachments in original file format! I do not know of a tool that can do this better, or more efficiently! This is a huge benefit to companies that would like to extract attachments from Salesforce for tasks like data migrations.
Cross-object data extract within one file. You can pull data from related objects as long as there is a populated lookup from the object you are extracting, to another object (Child or Parent).
UI is simple and requires very little to no training. Given the acquisition of Mulesoft by Salesforce, I would not be surprised if DataLoader.IO is rolled out as the new global data loading tool for Salesforce.
At the moment, I can't find a way to rename jobs. This would be useful to organize what was previously created hastily by techs in a rush.
A preview of the job, especially upserts, would take a great deal of stress away from some of us (especially those who are not so confident in their ETL practice).
A native vlookup equivalent may be a welcome addition.
It is easy to use and doesn't require a security token, so I enjoy using it. It also doesn't require any download or installation, which is sometimes a blocker to gettingthings done if the company has limits. also, the dataloader.io is easy for other people to pick up, so others can have visibility into the data jobs that have occurred
It is an intuitive application to use. Within a few clicks, you can be signed in to your org and ready to perform tasks. Data imports/exports/updates are streamlined so you can quickly start and configure your jobs. These can run in the background while you set up new tasks. Job history and tasks currently running on are on your home screen.
Once set up, it's very easy to use and keep running, it's getting to that point that can make it cumbersome to some. Also, depending on the data that you want to replicate, the configuration files can become quite cumbersome to maintain. Learning curve can be high for some who are not as experienced with databases and transactions.
Customer support might be where Dataloader.io saves money. Most of the competitors offer 24/7 live support but Dataloader.io only offers support via email and the community. Those types of support work fine until you need an answer right away. Some questions can't wait until the next business day or business hours for a reply.
Oracle Support for Oracle GoldenGate has been quite responsive and quite helpful in the few situations where we've needed it. Furthermore, the documentation on Oracle GoldenGate is so good that we often do not need to contact support with issues as the fix is already documented and able to be run by us without needing to open a ticket.
We've had Oracle consultants come as well for training days to talk about new features, parts of Oracle GoldenGate we may not be using and things of that nature. The consultants they send are great as they're very knowledgeable about all things Oracle GoldenGate and great resources for any questions or concerns you may have with the product.
We used Oracle University for our Oracle Golden Gate Training and it was top notch. We were able to turn our whole DBA team to Oracle GoldenGate newbies to Oracle GoldenGate troubleshooting experts in a matter of a few days, while this obviously did not come cheap, the company felt that it was worth the investment.
If Oracle GoldenGate is new to your organization, expose as many DBAs as possible to it. Having your whole team fluent in it will overcome early operational hurdles and allow it to more quickly become an accepted and supported part of your supported platform for your team that will enable the business to use it to its fullest.
I have used salesforce inspector also for operations like import and export of data from custom objects but it doesn't work well when you have data in huge numbers. Instead of using Salesforce Inspector, one should go for Dataloader.io if the number of records is huge to be dealt with.
We use Oracle Data Guard as a backup tool, but not for data replication. Data Guard is not suited for real-time data replication in our non-normalized reporting database nor for the database we are using for our upgrade project, as Data Guard is not able to transform data and is not able to synchronize data into different schemas, which is necessary for our project. Additionally, our project database is on Oracle 12g not 11i: I am not 100% sure Data Guard is able to replicate from 11i to 12g
Have never had any issues with scaling Oracle GoldenGate itself, however Oracle GoldenGate Monitor does have scaling issues, but with Oracle GoldenGate now able to be monitored by Oracle Enterprise Manager, this is no longer an issue, in my opinion.
HUGE time saving. When we need to clean or review data, we used to have to do it line by line. This can do the work within excel and make cleanup/management an afternoons work as opposed to a week.
Rollback what you did/change/deleted is relatively simple if you remember to back up the data you are manipulating.
In earlier versions, DDL support was limited as well as the need of primary key constraints in the source tables. This made me create partitions, sub-partitions, truncatations and perform other operations upon they are performed in source systems and I need to discuss with source system administrators and need to convince them to let them create primary keys for replicated tables.
But both issues are solved now.
Installation is straightforward, easy.
Deployed everything within Oracle Data Integrator.
Developing 1000 of ODI interfaces for loading into Operational Data Store took not more than 100 man/days. But, adding them to Golden Gate is taking not more than 5 man/days.
Management Pack and VeriData are additional packs for your management and data verification needs.
