IBM InfoSphere Optim vs. Oracle GoldenGate

Optim is especially recommended for those companies that have their own or third-party development teams that must be provided with a complete data environment to test the applications. Optim is not recommended for use as an ETL or Data Integration tool.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Easily extract data from production environments with no-coding
• Intelligent filtering capabilities using physical or logical relationships.
• Advanced data masking funtions

Incentivized

• As the product under the Oracle umbrella, it perfectly and natively supports the Oracle database very well.
• For the standard scenario and use cases, the configuration is straight-forward (in our case uni-direction copy from source to target).
• It is robust and the performance meets our SLA, even for a large amount of data volume.
• The error report is not only detailed but hits the right points, so trouble shooting is easy.

Incentivized

• Poor UI
• Complex architecture

Incentivized

• The earlier versions of Golden Gate were complex to use as there was no front end. All that works was the command line.
• The cost of the product can be a detriment to most companies.
• The product has been augmented over the years and has so many features that it can be overwhelming.

Incentivized

Oracle GoldenGate is a core part of our business.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Oracle GoldenGate has only gone down for us when the data being sent was bad.

Incentivized

Oracle GoldenGate's performance is great for our use cases. Your mileage may vary.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Optim can save companies a lot of money by protecting the sensitive data found in their databases, thus avoiding the theft of real customer information with the economic and media impact that this has.
• Accelerate the generation of non-productive environments saving time from human resources.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized