Leveraging GoldenGate for Real-time Replication for Cloud Migrations

Organizations across the world are grappling with the challenge of minimizing database downtime while upgrading or migrating  their mission-critical environments. Especially when they depend on applications that need to work on a continuous or near-continuous basis without disrupting services, it becomes all the more critical to eliminate database downtime from the migration process. Oracle GoldenGate provides a viable solution with its real-time database  migration and replication capabilities  that allows organizations to create a clone database in the cloud while maintaining  unhindered availability of services on-prem.

We  like to shed more light here on everything Oracle GoldenGate can do for your organization and how it may be the answer to all your migration concerns.

Read on.

The power of Oracle GoldenGate

Oracle GoldenGate works incredibly well replicating data between  homogenous as well as heterogeneous  database systems. It is a real-time data replication tool  that works in a non-intrusive manner with low overhead from operational to analytical enterprise systems.

Organizations rely on it for accurate data capture, routing, transformation, and delivery from a source database to a target database in real time. With reduced planned downtime along with a host of other features, it offers a sound solution to organizations to migrate without disrupting their existing services. It reads online transaction logs, transforms data, and works continuously even in rapidly changing environments.  It can also be configured to run bidirectionally, supporting high volumes, moving an infinite amount of transactions per second as per the need while causing little or no impact on the primary system while doing so. The target database serves as a transactional replica that can support applications in read-write mode

Oracle has multiple ways to monitor the GoldenGate replication process. Oracle GoldenGate Monitor offers enterprise-wide visibility into replication status with real-time alerts. Oracle Enterprise Manager can also be used to monitor GoldenGate processes and status. 

So let’s dive deeper into what it’s all about.

Oracle GoldenGate supports the following datastores for source and target systems:

• Oracle as well as non-Oracle databases (MySQL, IBM DB2, MS SQL, Sybase, etc.)
• Flat files and unstructured data files
• JMS and Java API
• Big Data tools and technologies like Hadoop, HBase, Kafka, etc. and supports NoSQL (MongoDB, Cassandra, and Oracle NoSQL) 
• Captures data from Google Cloud, AWS, Oracle Cloud, and Azure

For Oracle database migration, Oracle GoldenGate ensures:

• High-speed data movement for superior performance
• Reduction in buffer latency since databases are optimized for GoldenGate
• Transactional integrity with built-in conflict detection and resolution
• Secure data delivery using SSL and encryptionFast end-to-end process automation with pre-built, configuration-based integrations

For Non-Oracle database migration, GoldenGate ensures:

• Seamless integration among both Oracle and non-Oracle databases and datastores (examples include Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, Teradata, MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, HDFS, Kafka, Spark, and cloud object stores)
• Transactional integrity with built-in conflict detection and resolution 
• Secure data delivery using SSL and encryption
• keeping databases synchronized irrespective of their geographic location

Key capabilities of GoldenGate for migration include:

• Easy-to-use graphical user experience that allows, monitoring, and managing of operations
• Data validation and visibility into real-time performance and usage across sources and targets with end-to-end monitoring
• Automatic scaling and parallel transaction processing to manage changing workloads
• Inline data preparation for enrichment, analytics, transformation, and validation 
• Supports data movement topology and architecture patterns across operating systems, endianness, character sets, and object structures

Key benefits of using GoldenGate

Oracle GoldenGate offers several benefits to organizations planning to migrate their database systems to Cloud, with the support for heterogenous systems, real-time migration, change data capture for data transformation, availability of both the source and target systems in read/write mode.

The best part about GoldenGate is that migration happens without missing out on any items despite the large number of tables and columns. The data is immediately available on the target database without necessitating any jobs or interfaces for viewing it. GoldenGate’s ability to seamlessly modify data in transit saves a lot of time too. 

Some of the top benefits of using GoldenGate include:

• Supports heterogeneous migration
• Applications can be running on the active source system, while the data is replicated/migrated to its target in the cloud in real-time. 
• Data and database validations can be performed on the target database while real-time migration is going on from source to target in the cloud.
• You can test application functionality against the target database in the cloud while the real-time is ongoing from source to target
• For real-time migration you don’t need large bandwidth, it is only needed during the initialization process (initial load)

Migrate with MiCORE

Oracle GoldenGate is preferred by some of the top Fortune 500 companies in the world to meet the changing demands of modern transaction-driven applications. You can deploy it too with a little help and guidance. At MiCORE, we believe cloud and database expertise is critical if you wish to create a lean and reliable database environment for your organization.

As an Oracle Certified Partner, we can help you with:

• Cloud readiness assessment and planning
• Cloud migration services & solutions
• Database management
• Integration services

We can assist you with everything from database migrations to ongoing management and monitoring to support mission-critical systems and ensure business continuity. Our team of certified DBAs and cloud engineers offer client-focused solutions and services for migration and beyond. Call us today to know more.