Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Gene Baker Vice President, Chief Architect, Development Manager and Software Engineer
Read full review We use SQL Compare to troubleshoot performance problems quite a bit since our data model is more like a template and not everything is 100% in sync and customization occurs between different client databases. We continually get pulled into performance issues and the developers will say Client A is performing different than Client B, why? Using SQL Compare, we usually find that one client was tuned and had indexes altered or added that weren't deployed to all clients or other objects weren't deployed correctly during the release. On the other hand, since our data model practices allow client databases to drift I tried to create a new golden image by trying to compare multiple databases based on the same data model and found it to be a very difficult process to complete using SQL Compare. SQL Compare gave me too much information and doesn't allow enough filtering to eliminate a lot of the noise.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Simple and easy comparison of database schemas and data. Differences can be copied or synced from one database to another with a click of a button. You can save "projects" so that you can easily rerun a previous comparison whenever you need to. It has a very simple, easy to learn interface. I've never needed to read any documentation or watch any tutorials in order to figure out how to do something. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Pricing.... I wish there was an inexpensive developer version I could buy for myself. Portability.... I would like to use it from a flash drive so I can use it where ever I am asked to work. Unbundled.... This may be available already but I dont' recall I can buy it cheaply as a stand-alone product. Its only part of the bundle - cost effectively. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Oracle GoldenGate is a core part of our business.
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review It's a good tool to have, but becomes expensive to buy a user license for each developer.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Oracle GoldenGate has only gone down for us when the data being sent was bad.
Read full review Performance Oracle GoldenGate's performance is great for our use cases. Your mileage may vary.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review They have a great community website where you can search for answers but are also very responsive when it comes to direct support.
Read full review In-Person Training 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.
Read full review Online Training 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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
Read full review I've used Visual Studio Database Projects for this type of work in the past with some success, but Redgate SQL Compare is faster, more transparent, and simply easier to use. Faster is self explanatory. More transparent, means that it's much easier to set up your desired options for schema change deployment scripts. Easier to use, It's really dead simple. Start a project, connect your source, connect destination, click compare.
Read full review Scalability 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.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Makes deployment fairly simple. Cutting our deployment time down. With the SDK, we can customize our deployment process very quickly and easily. History is not great, it does create scripts you can go back and see but it would be nice to have a quicker version view by object to save time. Read full review ScreenShots