Real time replication in a Heterogeneous environment
November 23, 2016
Real time replication in a Heterogeneous environment
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Oracle GoldenGate
We're in a data warehousing project where we need to replicate from multiple source/intermediary systems (MS SQL Servers and Sybase) into Oracle as our reporting platform. GoldenGate fulfilled our needs of having a reliable means of extracting live data from multiple heterogeneous databases and feed into an EDW. In that sense, it's an invaluable tool for the report writers and business analysts across the organization. There are some hiccups here and there, mostly having to do with some data transformations and certain long transactions, but overall, it performs reliably well and better than other alternative replication products we're tried.
- GoldenGate can handle multiple database vendors (SQL Server, Sybase, DB2, Enscribe, etc.) and replicate data in real-time.
- It's flexible and can perform data transformation/cleansing on the fly when you provide the mapping file for it. Exceptionally good error handling and data collision handling. Over some years, we have some large tables with 10 million records or more, and have seen only a very few records missing/incorrect.
- Good support responses. GoldenGate was well-supported when it was an independent company, and even though Oracle acquired it, it still has a good support organization.
- It's expensive. And I believe you have to purchase a license for each type of source and/or target DB that you're trying to replicate.
- It will be slow for a single transaction that updates a large number of rows. It's better to break up such transactions into batches and run them in a loop with periodic commits (Batch Insert or Batch Update).
- It's buggy when reading SQL Server transaction logs; may cause an abend.
- It's a single product that can connect to multiple types of databases, so the learning curve will be smaller and can help your organization standardize on your reporting platform.
- It serves our business needs of having a "single source of truth".
- Real-time replication means more up-to-the-minute reporting. There are certain reports that the users want more than just having last night's data.
- Oracle Streams and SharePlex
We chose GoldenGate initially because we have a heterogeneous database environment and it was very difficult to report across different data marts residing on different databases. Not only did it become very hard to maintain, the reports were also inaccurate and hard to compare. GoldenGate helps us to consolidate that into a single reporting environment for all data marts, allowing our business users to quickly report on real-time replicated data.