Oracle GoldenGate vs. Oracle Hyperion (legacy) vs. SharePlex

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.

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Well suited: For use in multiple offices around the world. I was able to obtain financial reporting data from 5 foreign offices and then consolidate their data with 3 domestic USA offices to prepare a consolidated financial statement. Less Appropriate: Translating the financial value for consulting services could be a bit challenging because that required human interaction and judgement. It would have been great to be able to set up some software to be able to interpret this and let it run for all future project work revenue projection.

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SharePlex really shines when set alongside GoldenGate. The licensing costs of the two products would appear to place them in entirely different ballparks yet they perform nearly identically in practice. SharePlex is suitable for heterogenous replication of one database to another. The list of targets is ever increasing, with support for all major RDBMS vendors as well as support for popular NoSQL and JSON replication. SharePlex is effective when replicating from on-premise to cloud. Whether that's migrating data, creating a high-availability presence in a public or private cloud, or populating a data mart, it does the job quite well.

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• 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.

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• This product handles budgeting by Employee and/or Position very well. It is highly flexible and allows Hyperion administrators the ability to develop a planning application that fits a variety of different business needs.
• It is great at calculating benefits using business rules to automate the population of these fringe costs in the overall budget planning process. This greatly reduces user error.
• It allows you to seed the operating budget based on changes to key drivers, such as percentage increases, flat dollar increases and more detailed changes using business rules.
• Allows visibility into the plans for each unit across the organization, rolled up into an overall budget for the campus.
• It handles the creation of budgets with multiple chartfield segments or dimensions, which most other budgeting systems cannot handle well. It can aggregate these very quickly.

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• SharePlex is highly configurable and versatile. It can handle virtually any kind of data replication needs.
• SharePlex is very robust. Its message queuing mechanism provides fast data transfer from the source to the target.
• SharePlex software is very stable and mature, and it is highly scalable and reliable.
• SharePlex support is exceptionally good. We are very satisfied with its support engineers.

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• 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.

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• One pain point for us is the consolidation and translation process. Needing to translate the data over and over again is frustrating and there is no visibility into how many users are running a translation. If multiple users attempt to translate the same data set, say goodbye to your performance but you have no way of knowing! (Unless you want to pull up a task audit which is not a very realistic expectation). It has the been the quickest way for us to bring the system to it's knees. The consolidation process performs in direct correlation to the complexity of the calculation/consolidation rules. So, while the product is extremely flexible, you still have to be careful how you design your rules and calculations to make sure that you do it on the smallest subset of data as possible to avoid large processing times. This makes sense, but requires some significant expertise that most organizations do not have in-house.
• The Hyperion Financial Reporting product is ridiculously outdated and clunky to use. The interface for designing reports is not intuitive, and not easy to modify once a report is built. I think there must be a strategic decision to move away from it and go to something more like Oracle BI because I just can't understand why in the world they don't update the reporting product. It also requires a significant level of expertise to be able to use. Not a great solution at all if you want multiple end-users to create reports in something other than Excel. Nobody except the HFM admin (which I used to be) in our company even touches this module.
• Another pain point is the amount of IT support that is required to run this thing, and again, specialized knowledge of Hyperion products and how they work is required for IT to adequately support it. This goes for application servers and the Oracle database that the applications are running on.

• When first introduced the Change Data Capture process was awkward. Each subsequent release has improved the process.
• Sometimes the Shareplex monitoring service in Foglight gets overly aggressive in sending out error notifications and can end up spamming the admins with email alerts for one problem. We have had to tone that down.

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Oracle GoldenGate is a core part of our business.

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We're in the middle of the road because we are not sure that other products on the market fit the bill for what we need yet. Hyperion is expensive and burdensome from an administrator and maintenance standpoint, but it still seems to be the best solution for what we need. Show us an equally capable SaaS consolidation product and we'll talk again.

We depend on it to supply data to our various OLTP and Data Warehouse environments

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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.

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It is very usable once you get over the initial setup.

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

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

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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.

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The premium support team provides much needed dedicated customer service which we are after for what we have paid for this service. We are satisfied with the service and support and do not have any instance where there was an issue that requires escalation to get the right support team. Though the incidence of major issues that requires the premium support are less, we prefer to keep this as a safety net.

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Support is very responsive. They take ownership of the problems and see them through to the finish. When a bug is found they work towards developing testing and making the fix available to us to solve the problem.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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I use Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Mangement because the company I work at requires me to use it in the Financial Planning sector as most of their data is stored in it. I am open minded and ready to use other performance management tools created by Oracle if my work permits.

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SharePlex support is an award-winning team, which is available for 24 hours, and any time they have solutions with perfect expertise. Besides, SharePlex has supported data migration, with multiple reporting features that ensure there are comprehensive database evaluations. The simplicity of SharePlex installation also gives it a higher mark, is very efficient, and allows companies to understand it easily.

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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.

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• 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.

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• Oracle Hyperion allows us to automate and consolidate financial data that used to be performed manually in spreadsheets. From that perspective the ROI is huge.
• Oracle Hyperion functionality is extensive and allows us to perform most functions for planning, consolidating and reporting on our financial data.
• One negative with Oracle Hyperion is that it is complicated to implement and maintain. It takes expertise at all levels (infrastructure and management) to realize the benefits from it.

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• Postive: easy to replicate data for non-prod use
• Negative: we spent a lot time due to data out of sync

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