Oracle GoldenGate Reviews

The product's micro service architecture is scalable. 

The solution needs to improve its latency, monitoring and support. 

I have been working with the product for six months. 

The tool is scalable. 

The tool's setup is complicated. One engineer is enough to monitor the solution. 

The tool needs to improve its pricing. 

I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

I used Oracle GoldenGate for some migrations and consultations between different types of businesses.

Oracle GoldenGate has a lot of benefits. You can use Oracle GoldenGate as a DR for your system. You can use the solution if you don't want to have unnecessary recovery using synchronization or have some restrictions, like character suit or limited use.

Oracle GoldenGate can help if you have only to replicate the subset of your data and not the full data. Suppose you are in an organization with many branches and are interested in replicating only the accounting and not the financial data. In that case, Oracle GoldenGate will help you with some considerations, calculations, and transformations associated with it.

In Oracle GoldenGate, we don't have full capabilities or information on ODI products for Oracle, which are specifically used for transformations. You can do your coding or transformation processes and do your job. Sometimes I use a quality tool for Oracle to do some transformation from data cleansing and data insights.

I know every Oracle product has been designed for each feature, and Oracle GoldenGate is a dedicated tool for better transformation and replication. It would be great if Oracle added some enhanced features or more functionalities to Oracle GoldenGate. Although currently, it's a good prototype, Oracle GoldenGate can do more.

I have been using Oracle GoldenGate for almost four years.

Oracle GoldenGate's stability is better if you follow the metrics for compatibility between software versions. If you follow all the metrics, Oracle GoldenGate's stability can be rated an eight to nine out of ten. However, you may face some bugs if you don't follow the metrics.

I rate Oracle GoldenGate an eight or nine out of ten for scalability. Oracle GoldenGate can work for small, medium, and enterprise companies. It's scalable to work on different scales.

We sometimes need to open the tickets with Oracle to get technical support. Depending on the team and the escalation level, sometimes we get a very good response from Oracle, and sometimes we don't.

Positive

Oracle GoldenGate's initial setup is very simple because Oracle has a dedicated version for every database, whether Oracle or non-Oracle. For the initial setup between the source and the solution, the ease of setup depends on the configuration and the business requirement. It does not depend only on the technology but on the customer's requirements. If you have a very complex replication, it needs a more complicated setup. It depends on each task.

We can't comment that it's always easy to have Oracle GoldenGate, and we can set it up in a day or two. Sometimes you can set it up within a few hours; other times, it needs very deep understanding and preparation before going to Oracle Golden Gate.

You might need some help from ODI or other tools to prepare your data and get ready. It will be easier if everything is clear and there is an understanding of the mapping between the source and destination, objects, and attributes. However, you cannot have a definite answer for all cases.

In certain cases, customers could install the solution themselves. Oracle has had a GUI interface for Oracle GoldenGate for two or three years called the microservices. Microservices can be easier to set up for single cases. However, if you have some complex cases, you will need some help understanding data, replication, and knowing if some preparation is required at the beginning.

I would recommend Oracle GoldenGate to other users because it’s a good product.

Overall, I rate Oracle GoldenGate an eight out of ten.

Oracle GoldenGate helps to replicate the changes in one environment on the other. For example, if a team installs new tables, those changes are mirrored on the other side.

Oracle GoldenGate helps to select and target specific tables for replication. Any changes or operations on those tables are immediately reflected in the source and target environments.

In some cases, expectations were not met, especially when specific tables were expected to be disabled, and changes were anticipated in the target environment. We had to take backups from the source and refresh the address to address this.

I have been working with the product for one and a half years. 

I rate the product's stability an eight out of ten. 

I haven't faced any issues with the solution's scalability. 

Oracle GoldenGate's cost is high. 

I rate the tool an eight out of ten. 

GoldenGate replicates in real time between heterogeneous databases such as SQL Server, DB2, Oracle, Sybase and others. In the next few years, we plan to use Oracle GoldenGate to real-time replicate to big data and the cloud.

Like everything else, it's getting complicated. I've been using it 15 years in the United States, which is probably at least the top one or two healthcare organizations in America, and it does quite an outstanding job. However, since GoldenGate was purchased by Oracle, it's become more challenging to work with. Obviously, Oracle is profitable but it's becoming quite tougher to work with.

For healthcare databases, there are three leaders for what they call EMRs, electronic medical records: Epic, the market leader in the United States; and then Cerner and GE/IDX. Oracle GoldenGate real-time replicates between databases, but not Epic's database, which is called Caché. Oracle does not do that. If you can come up with a product that replicates in real time from Caché to any other database such as Oracle, DB2, or SQL Server, you'll never have to work again. If you want to make a mint, that’s one thing it could do; it's wide open for somebody to tap into.

I have been using it for probably 15 years.

Stability is outstanding, far superior to IBM and other competitors. Real time replication, that's the key.

It is quite scalable. They're investing into migrating to the cloud, big data, bi-directional – to and from – real-time replication, streaming, and others.

The support from Oracle could be improved; it is sometimes a challenge. Candidly, and quite anonymously, we sometimes know the product better than the Oracle technical support does. Unfortunately, there are some communication challenges as well; understanding American English.

I recommend buying the product. It performs outstanding. If you want to offload from your online transaction processing, your application, to an enterprise data warehouse, data lake, etc., this is far beyond a superior tool to the competitors. It's worth the price.

My customer uses Oracle GoldenGate mostly for pumping data from one database to another, including data storage format changes. The solution is also used for migrating from one system to another and cross-platform migrations.

What I like most about Oracle GoldenGate is that it supports cross-platform migrations. For example, Oracle GoldenGate could pump data from one type of system to another such as the data from Oracle DB to SQL Db2.

What needs improvement in Oracle GoldenGate is the support.

Another feature that needs to be improved in the solution is its GUI. It would be useful for programmers or users to be able to work from the GUI, not just from the command line.

Simplifying how Oracle GoldenGate is used would also make the solution better.

I've been working with Oracle GoldenGate for more than three years.

Oracle GoldenGate is a stable solution because a lot of my customers use it and it doesn't hang. It doesn't crash. It works.

Oracle GoldenGate is a scalable solution.

The technical support for Oracle GoldenGate still needs a little bit of improvement. On a scale of one to five, I'm rating the support for the product as four out of five.

Oracle GoldenGate is quite complex to set up and support, though it has powerful features. Deployment could be completed within days or weeks, depending on your database and how your storage structure is implemented. The process may require some introduction and workarounds for it to go smoothly. It highly depends on the database you're using.

Licensing for Oracle GoldenGate is paid yearly.

I concentrate on Oracle products, and I'm currently working with Oracle GoldenGate.

My company provides Oracle GoldenGate for customers, so my team has been working with a lot of versions of the solution, starting from version 12 up to version 19.

My company works on consulting projects, and can also sell licenses, but if the customer has a license and requires some solutions, the team can provide complete services, starting from designing architecture, upgrading, ensuring there's minimal downtime, etc.

At the moment, my company has seven clients using Oracle GoldenGate.

My advice to others who want to start using Oracle GoldenGate is that it may not be as easy at the beginning, but it's a good product.

My current rating for Oracle GoldenGate is nine out of ten, but if I'm able to evaluate other solutions, that rating could change to a lower or higher rating.

The primary use case, generally speaking, is either data migration or data loading from an OLTP system to a data warehouse. It's probably Oracle's primary product for migration to the cloud, to later migrate from on-premises into cloud with zero downtime.

It allows us to migrate from one system to another, from one server to another, with no downtime, no outage. We can get the data synchronized with multiple databases and then switch the connectivity across to the new servers. Whether that's taking us from on-premise to the cloud or whether that's just going from server to server, either on-premise or within the cloud itself, it's an excellent solution.

It's the simplicity. It's very simple to configure, it's very simple to implement. In addition, the ability it has to capture data and transmit it with incredible speed is better than any of the product out there. It's extremely powerful.

It's extremely stable. It's one of the most stable products that I've ever used.

It scales well. You can either have it working in with the databases, or you can move it outside. It's got the ability to parallelize up, so you can certainly extract and replay the data from your databases in parallel. So it does have horizontal scalability. That is probably one of its stronger features, the ability just to automatically parallelize the replay and playing of data to allow to scale to large volumes.

This is a new solution for us. We did a proof of concept for all of the systems out there and discovered that, from a performance perspective, Golden Gate certainly met all of our requirements, which is not necessarily the case with some of the rivals out there.

Oracle has implemented a slightly different technology. Instead of scraping the redo logs, the way the traditional replication of this type of system works, it's actually using a new technology, with its integrated Extracts and Replicats, to effectively use Oracle's streams to double the performance. It can literally run twice as fast as anybody else. We needed that to keep up with our transaction volumes.

For me, the most important criteria when selecting a vendor is that it does the job.

I've done the initial setup of Golden Gate for many clients. It's extremely straightforward. It's probably the simplest replication tool I've ever used.

The one feature that I think Oracle could perhaps consider is, at the moment, the Veridata option is an extra cost. Golden Gate is an expensive product. You pay a lot for the best. But not including the Veridata license to prove that everything is working correctly... The big improvement for me would be to have that license built in. That would take it to the next level. That would make it a much better product.

You may want to look at buying term licenses if you've just got a single migration to do. In that situation, you might want a term license for perhaps a year to save a lot of money, rather than buying a perpetual license.

Other vendors that we were looking at were Dbvisit Replicate and Continuant, although the latter didn't have a product ready at that time (they do now). And there was also VMware Shareplex.

Those are the main rivals in the marketplace and, whilst they are substantially cheaper than Golden Gate, around a fifth of the price, they couldn't quite keep up with our transaction volumes.

You've got to balance the cost with your requirements. You may find that using something like Dbvisit Replicate is good enough for what you are doing, and it is substantially cheaper. 

Customers use Oracle GoldenGate because they need near real-time analytics to sync their source system to the ODS database.

With Oracle GoldenGate, you will have ODS databases, and you can create a foundation layer on top of it. You can also directly create ODS reports or operational reports. Every customer has 10 to 20 systems. When you put all of them into the same ODS structure, you can also enable integrated reports.

With Oracle GoldenGate, you can easily sync the tables and put them into the ODS database. You can easily monitor and maintain the system, and it doesn't need a primary key for sync; it reads from log shipping and the table. Oracle GoldenGate is a good product for syncing the database.

Oracle GoldenGate is a good product that works best with Oracle. Oracle GoldenGate's monitoring is good. You can easily see the detailed logs, timestamp points, and status of each table.

Oracle GoldenGate hangs for large tables. You cannot put everything in Golden Gate because it's licensed to hold systems. If you connect to another system with 20 CPUs, Golden Gate would need 20 more CPUs. You cannot put everything in Golden Gate for the license and large models. For that reason, we use Golden Gate and DB Link together. In some cases, we prefer to use DB Link; in others, Oracle GoldenGate.

We had to open a ticket three years ago because Oracle GoldenGate couldn't read the IBM system. However, the solution can read the IBM system now, and it depends on the source systems.

I am satisfied with the solution’s technical support.

The solution’s initial setup is easy.

There's an Oracle GoldenGate server on the net search. There'll be a firewall configuration to reach the data. Also, an agent is installed on the source system to get the sync data. The solution can be deployed in three months. Since Oracle GoldenGate is a technical and DBA product, only a few people are needed to deploy it.

Oracle GoldenGate's license can be expensive compared to other solutions like Qlik Replicate or SAP Replicate.

Oracle GoldenGate is installed and maintained easily. If you have a maintenance issue, Oracle's support team will handle it. Maintaining the solution is easy.

Users need to check if GoldenGate supports the source system, and they should do a POC for it. The technical guys should see the different types of mechanisms, like directly from data, log shipping, journal, etc. They should also see the latency. I know users will like the product if they do a POC phase.

Overall, I rate Oracle GoldenGate an eight out of ten.

We use the product internally to cover one of our data synchronization needs. The use case is likely to be unique in the world.

The solution involves 3000 pharmacies distributed geographically on several islands and continents. Each pharmacy has an ERP for managing pharmacy operations (sales, purchases, logistics, etc.). And we are synchronizing all the data and transactions that are generated in the ERP, with a central database (Exadata).

Our use case is complex and with Oracle GoldenGate we are improving the efficiency of the data replication and mostly the maintenance and operations support. We are in the process of migrating the current solution (based on queuing and web services) to Oracle Goldengate. Our current data synchronization process is old and not efficient enough to deal with 3000 data sources.

With Oracle Goldengate, we have more control over the CDC phase, and we can improve our management process which is critical for us.

The OGG CDC is flexible and robust but complex to manage. The OGG version with microservices is very important to us because we need to monitor and manage all the database sources. The current OGG monitor is limited to our operations and we built one for our needs using the OGG microservices.

While we like the CDC feature, it has some limitations in terms of what we can do and how to configure what we need to do. We are trying to fix those issues by implementing some workarounds.

Memory consumption is also an issue in OGG architecture. Each OGG data replicator consumes more and less 200 MB of RAM. We have 10 OGG hubs, each one with almost 300 data replicators to the central database. We need 64 GB for each Hub. a total of 640 GB just for data replication.

We've been working with the product for five years.

The solution, especially the last version, is very stable. Even with 3000 data sources, and a complex framework we're finding the solution to be very reliable.

The solution is very scalable when adopting a three-tier solution with hubs in the middle. Each OGG hub handles 300 interconnections. We have 10 hubs and, if we need to increase or expand, we put more servers in the system. It is very simple and expensive too.

In Portugal, we have a direct connection with Oracle (Portugal) due to the fact that our use case is so unique. We are also in direct contact with the Oracle Goldengate project manager through Oracle Portugal.

Everyone has been very good so far. Although the team in Portugal does not have the knowledge base necessary for our purposes, teams in India or the USA generally provide the required assistance.

At the scale where we are now, we have worked with Attunity. It is a similar CDC software data extraction. It's more straightforward and simple to configure, however, when you scale with the 3000 data sources, the system starts being unmanageable. And the total cost of ownership is higher than OGG.

OGG technology is not simple. The first setup took almost six months because we had a hard time finding OGG specialists on the market.

There are three support teams in the project. We have a support team for infrastructure management, a team of DBAs to manage the Exadata, and an operations team to manage the 3000 databases (sources). And we also have Oracle's support for bugs and problems that we encounter along the way.

We had external help from Oracle. And we hired specialists from Brazil who came to Portugal to help us.

In terms of price, as a client, I want always the cheaper price. But, in this case, we have a good deal with Oracle in terms of GoldenGate licenses. It's a lot of money but the business case is working for us. We need the information, and fast access to it, so we require an effective system. We already have one solution in place working, but it's a legacy system bases on web services and the operations costs are very expensice. We need to migrate asap to this new solution.

Yes, the current system we are using is based on Internet protocols. We are using web services and data streaming. But when you need to manage and operate 3000 data sources, every time you need to make a change it's a nightmare. The operations costs and time consumption in software development and depoly is too high to maintain.

We're currently in the middle of a huge project using Oracle GoldenGate. We have a unique business case in the world - synchronizing 3000 OLTP databases to an Exadata. Normally Oracle GoldenGate use cases are for 10 or 50 maximum data sources.

We are using OGG version 19 in the OGG Hubs (Replicators). In the source, we are using OGG version 13 microservices (Extractors).

We have a hybrid OGG architecture: the data source is on-premise and the hubs and the Exadata are in the OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure). We have on-premise extractors and replicators in the cloud. the connection is made through FastConnect. 

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. There are several features that have some real limitations for us. The product itself is not simple to manage and we take almost 6 months to learn the basics. There's also harsh memory consumption. Each connection is consuming almost 200 megabytes of memory, and, with the 3000 databases, that's a lot of resources to manage.