How Problems with Oracle GoldenGate are Harming Your Business

Oracle GoldenGate is a valuable part of many organizations’ workflow for data integration and replication, spanning databases and environments to get you the real-time information your business needs. For all the benefits that it brings users, however, GoldenGate is also responsible for a few common issues, concerns, and pain points.

Not only do these problems take valuable time out of your day to fix, GoldenGate’s performance issues will accumulate over time, costing you serious gains in terms of productivity and efficiency. This article will address some of the biggest challenges that organizations face with Oracle GoldenGate and ideas about how to resolve them. For more insight into these challenges, download our white paper, Top 9 Challenges of GoldenGate – and How to Solve Them.

Batch Processing and Handling Lag

Creating millions of database transactions quickly is likely to create lags of several hours if you don’t approach the problem intelligently. For example, if you run an e-commerce website, then you may need to perform mass updates by lowering items’ prices during holiday sales. These updates can easily require changes to millions or even billions of records, resulting in significant lag time. If you’re struggling to maintain performance due to serious lag, try tuning your database/GoldenGate to reduce the number of apply processes (which are known as “Replicat” in GoldenGate) or scaling up your GoldenGate configuration to handle the increased activity.

Performance Issues with ETL Operations

Extract/transform/load (ETL) operations – in particular the “transform” part – are highly complex and costly undertakings, especially in the era of mobile devices, cloud computing, and big data analytics. Many organizations use GoldenGate to move data from an online transaction processing (OLTP) database to a data warehouse, which means that the data must be transformed before being written to the target tables. In many cases, you may need to use separate tools to help with ETL operations, such as iWay’s DataMigrator or Oracle’s own Data Integrator and Warehouse Builder. GoldenGate can be used to perform transformations reducing compute time of ETL by some extent.

Cloud Implementations with Low Bandwidth

If you’re struggling with low bandwidth between multiple servers, especially if they’re in far-flung geographical locations, then you’ll likely experience performance issues like bottlenecks and slow network performance. These problems make it harder for Oracle GoldenGate to do its job and can result in lags and crashes during data pumping – so why are you spending time and money to maintain multiple servers if they’re not continuously available? Fortunately, even on low-bandwidth networks, you can tweak and fine-tune GoldenGate parameters in order to make data replication activities possible.

Active-Active Replication

Active-active replication, also known as bidirectional replication, is one of the best ways to avoid a catastrophic loss of data, but it’s easier said than done to implement it using Oracle GoldenGate. If you want to leverage active-active replication for your own organization, you need to consider how you plan on handling problems such as resolving data collisions, supporting a variety of heterogeneous environments, and reducing latency, overhead, and interprocess dependencies. Detecting and resolving data conflicts between multiple databases and servers is something that requires the support of data replication experts.

Final Thoughts

If the GoldenGate performance issues highlighted above sound all too familiar, there’s no need to passively accept your fate. Download Datavail’s white paper Top 9 Challenges of Oracle GoldenGate – and How to Fix Them to learn how you can solve your GoldenGate frustrations and get a better handle on your enterprise data.