Oracle Real-Time Advance Taps Compressed Data

Oracle's GoldenGate technology is about real-time change data capture (CDC), a low-latency approach to data integration, and an upgrade of the middleware announced on Monday promises significantly broader support for data managed by Oracle databases.

Oracle GoldenGate 11g Release 2, which is part of Oracle Fusion Middleware, has been directly integrated with Oracle Database so that it can read data changes as they happen within the database. Previously the CDC technology relied on reading data-redo requests after the fact from database logs. With direct capture, the software not only gains speed and performance, with support for multithreaded processing, it can also handle compressed data.

"In the previous release, we didn't support tables with compression," Brad Adelberg, a VP of development at Oracle, told InformationWeek. "Now, even if a table is compressed, we can do change data capture off of that table."

That's significant given that ever-growing data stores have demanded the use of compression. In fact, columnar compression is a key selling point of the Oracle Exadata database machine. So Oracle Database customers using GoldenGate can get real-time access to data whether it's compressed or not. Direct integration also future proofs the GoldenGate/Oracle Database combination, according to Adelberg.

[ Want more on Oracle integration options? Read Oracle Integration Release Meets Real Time Demands. ]

"As new Oracle Database features are added, they'll now be exposed and available to GoldenGate immediately without dependencies on how they might be exposed through logs," he explained.

In another R2 enhancement aimed at Oracle customers, GoldenGate management and monitoring features have been integrated with Oracle Enterprise Manager. That means customers will be able manage CDC within the confines of a familiar management environment used for many other Oracle software administrative tasks.

Oracle GoldenGate also works with a variety of third-party data sources, and Oracle said it has enhanced support for heterogeneity since acquiring GoldenGate in 2009. R2 adds support for PostGreSQL as a target database, for example. In addition, IBM DB2 on iSeries can now be used as a CDC data source; it was previously accessible only as a target database for GoldenGate. Using this IBM database as a source will benefit Oracle JD Edwards customers, among others who use IBM mainframes.

GoldenGate is typically used in operational reporting and business-intelligence applications calling for real-time insight, meaning within seconds or minutes rather than the hours or overnight periods typically associated with batch extract, transform, and load (ETL) data integration. The software is also used for database migration, consolidation, and disaster recovery, ensuring that replacement databases or replications are quickly in sync with source databases.

GoldenGate complements Oracle Data Integration software, which is usually the choice in ETL batch operations that call for extensive data-transformation processes. Oracle GoldenGate 11g R2 is available immediately.