Item: Oracle GoldenGate
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our company in EMEA region has two data centers, working in the Active/Passive(standing by) mode. We use Oracle GoldenGate to "clone" the live data transactions from the master database (which resides in the currently active data center) to the standing-by database (which is in the limited read-only mode, and resides in our passive data center). If the active DC is down and DR is required, the standing-by database in the passive DC will be promoted to the master one which can take R/W transactions, and the OGG will reverse the uni-direction data copy. This pattern is applied on all business critical IT application's DB instances.

Pros and Cons

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.

The metrics UI is another product that should be purchased separately, with high price, we use open source Grafana as a replacement.
Documentation can be improved. Sometimes [it is] not so easy to find the correct information quickly.

Return on Investment

Oracle GoldenGate guarantees our standing-by database in passive data center, is always in "pre-warmed" status, as the data is always in-sync with the master database in our active data center. At any time, the standing-by database can kick in in case the active DC encounters the serious issue. This significantly increases the IT application's high availability and promise to "business as usual".

Key Insights

Do you think Oracle GoldenGate delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Oracle GoldenGate's feature set?

Yes

Did Oracle GoldenGate live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Oracle GoldenGate go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Oracle GoldenGate again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

Oracle GoldenGate is very handy to deal with Data Center to Data Center DB copy (near real time), uni-directional or bi-directional, it is also suitable to copy the data from production environment to the testing/dev environments. If you also have to deal with the problem of decoupling the reporting purposed read from the busy transaction-intensive operational DB instance, OGG will be also a good candidate. However Oracle GoldenGate is like the other Oracle products, quite expensive, so the small/medium company may not be able to afford the cost.

OGG - always in-sync

Overall Satisfaction with Oracle GoldenGate