GoldenGate Strategy - Oracle CloudWorld 2023

Today, one of my first sessions at Oracle CloudWorld 2023 was on GoldenGate. I took a little recap of where the product is and where it is going. There were many interesting elements of this session, and throughout this blog, I will try to summarise them.

GoldenGate’s heritage is a data integration tool usually set up and used by DBAs. My own limited experience of GoldenGate is that it needed a fairly specialised skillset. I think it was a skillset that DBAs wore proudly - a sign that they were technically adept.

The strategy for GoldenGate now, if I were to paraphrase the session, is to move it away from being a highly skilled sub-DBA task and move it closer to the end users and consumers of data. This will be achieved by several things. Firstly, decoupling it from a tool predominantly owned and managed by DBAs. They have also made inroads into making less technically complex, GUI-driven (which I like), with many adaptors and connectors, effectively making it open.

In terms of getting the data closer to consumers (Data Bricks, SnowFlake, Kafka), some products provide a subscribe and consume model for data. This has proven to be very popular, and it looks like GoldenGate is going in that direction, which I think is great. GoldenGate Hub is used to feed Kafka at the moment, but that will also change with some of the new features being released and announced at Oracle CloudWorld.

In the next release, 23c GoldenGate is free with a perpetual license for databases up to 20GB. This could possibly allow GoldenGate to be used and packaged into applications, which is an interesting pivot.

Another move for GoldenGate is to enable vector embedding. This is a way to convert words and sentences into numbers to capture their meaning and relationships (yes, I did have to google it). That is something that I need to look into more!

Finally, there was discussion on re-architecting GoldenGate to make it easier to build out a resilient redundant MAA deployment, something that was previously a heavyweight engineering project, which is certainly true if you see the 77-page PDF here: https://www.oracle.com/a/tech/docs/maa-goldengate-hub.pdf.

Here are some links to some useful bits and pieces; one thing is for sure, GoldenGate is a completely different animal now, and I applaud Oracle for its direction of travel.

• GoldenGate Veridata
• GoldenGate for Big Data

What do you think about GoldenGate?

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