Oracle GoldenGate: 4 Evolutions and Innovations

Oracle is one of the most celebrated enterprise database technology companies, and Oracle GoldenGate is one of the company’s most valuable offerings. As organizations grow and evolve, so too do their needs for accurate, up-to-the-minute information.

 
Relying on a single database, or a single type of database, no longer fits the needs of companies that seek to be truly data-driven. That’s where Oracle GoldenGate comes in: helping you consolidate, migrate, and replicate data across a wide variety of data sources and targets. GoldenGate significantly reduces problems such as lack of space, network latency, and data migration pain points that are holding too many organizations back.

With a storied 25-year history, Oracle GoldenGate has introduced many new innovations over just the past decade in order to remain relevant in a constantly evolving IT landscape. In this post, we’ll examine some of the latest developments with GoldenGate and the benefits these have had for GoldenGate users.

1. Cloud computing

The cloud is perhaps the biggest revolution in enterprise IT of the 21st century. By moving to the cloud, organizations of all sizes and industries have cut costs, improved their flexibility and scalability, ensured business continuity, and reduced their maintenance obligations.

Oracle has fully embraced cloud computing, with many of its offerings now in the transition period from on-premises to the cloud. This includes GoldenGate, which is now available in the cloud as GoldenGate Cloud Service (GGCS).

The GoldenGate platform itself has also embraced cloud data sources and targets. In just the past few years, GoldenGate has added support for a variety of cloud services:

• AWS services such as Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Redshift, Amazon S3, and Amazon RDS
• Microsoft Azure services such as Azure SQL Database and Azure HDInsight
• Oracle services such as Oracle Database Cloud and OCI Object Storage
• Cloud data warehouses such as Google BigQuery and Snowflake

2. NoSQL databases

The past decade has also seen the rise of non-relational, or “NoSQL,” databases as a viable alternative to traditional relational row-column databases. According to a 2019 survey of developers, 40 percent of databases are now NoSQL, a broad category which includes key-value stores, document stores, graph databases, and column-oriented databases.

GoldenGate has long supported non-Oracle databases such as Microsoft SQL Server and IBM DB2. More recently, GoldenGate has added support for Oracle NoSQL Database through the Oracle NoSQL Handler. The platform also has a separate module Oracle GoldenGate for Big Data, which supports replication into many big data NoSQL targets.

3. Automation

Business process automation has led to leaps and bounds in improvements to worker productivity over the past two decades. The good news is that highly complex IT processes such as GoldenGate lend themselves easily to automation.

By including automation features, GoldenGate saves employees from the tedious task of managing the platform manually. GoldenGate now includes features such as automatic configuration, automatic sharding, and automatic conflict detection and resolution (CDR).

For example, GoldenGate’s automatic sharding feature makes it easier to replicate data across a sharded database, with different rows separated into multiple tables. Meanwhile, automatic CDR helps detect and fix conflicts when the same data is updated simultaneously in different locations.

4. Microservices

Microservices is a trendy development architecture that separates the different components of an application into multiple connected services. Each service runs in its own process, communicates with other services via an API, and can be deployed independently.

GoldenGate now supports both a classic and a microservices architecture, so that users can choose the option that works best for their own IT environment. The microservices architecture separates various GoldenGate components, such as administration, distribution, and metrics collection, into their own independent microservice. By offering a new microservices-based foundation for GoldenGate, Oracle has signaled its willingness to stay at the forefront of development trends, helping users streamline their GoldenGate deployments and increase data security.

Conclusion

From microservices and automation to NoSQL databases and the cloud, Oracle GoldenGate has been savvy enough to evolve in response to a constantly changing IT landscape. These adaptations have enabled GoldenGate to offer a wide variety of use cases, making it one of the most effective solutions in the Oracle toolbox.

Want to learn more about the surprising breadth of capabilities that GoldenGate has in store? Download our white paper “Top 10 Most Valuable GoldenGate Use Case Scenarios” to learn how our clients have leveraged GoldenGate to their benefit.