Informatica PowerCenter vs Oracle GoldenGate comparison

Informatica PowerCenter is a data integration and data visualization tool. The solution works as an enterprise data integration platform that helps organizations access, transform, and integrate data from various systems. The product is designed to support companies in the full cycle of a project, from its initial rollout to critical deployments. Informatica PowerCenter allows developers and analysts to collaborate while accelerating the work process to deploy projects within days instead of months.

The Advanced edition of the product provides an additional real-time engine which allows companies to have always-on enterprise data integration. This ensures seamless collaboration and increment of data lineage visibility and impacts analysis.

The Premium edition of the solution offers an early warning system that detects unexpected behaviors or incorrect utilization of resources in the workflows and alerts companies in the case that these occur. This version of the product also offers automatic data validation, which ensures data accuracy and reduces testing time and expenditure of resources for by up to 90%.

Informatica PowerCenter Features

The product provides users with various features which allow them to execute data integration initiatives such as analytics, data warehousing, data governance, consolidation, and application migration. The features of the solution include:

• Collaboration: Informatica PowerCenter offers role-based tools and processes which enable business self-service while benefiting from high-quality IT resources.
  
  
• Automation: Through various automations and easy-to-use software, users can utilize graphical and codeless tools and initiate effective data integration without additional knowledge.
  
  
• Scalability: The tool provides high scalability to users, which ensures seamless performance and minimum downtime. PowerCenter also has adaptive load balancing, pushdown optimization, and dynamic partitioning.
  
  
• Monitoring: Through the extensive monitoring feature, the operations and governance of the solution are easily overseen by users. The tool also provides alerts that can prevent damage to the system.
  
  
• Real-time data: Through real-time data, users can monitor applications and analytics, ensuring their efficient operation.
  
  
• Prototyping: Informatica lets its users collaborate with information technology to prototype, profile, and validate results in a timely manner.
  
  
• Connectivity: Users can access and integrate data from different types of sources through high-performance connectors.
  
  
• Automated data validation testing: The product offers script-free automated and repeatable audit and validation of data.
  
  
• Data transformation: This feature allows users to use comprehensive parsing of JSON, PDF, XML, Microsoft Office, and the Internet of Things (IoT) for non-relation data.
  
  
• Cloud applications connectivity: The product allows for seamless connection to cloud application sources and targets.

Informatica PowerCenter Benefits

The benefits of using Informatica PowerCenter include:

• The tool can work over a wide range of systems and platforms and also allows for lean integration.
  
  
• It enhances the quality and speed of performance and optimizes the cost of the process for your organization.
  
  
• PowerCenter supports multiple databases, including TPump, Parallel Transporter Fastload, and Teradata MLoad.
  
  
• The tool is very easy to monitor and maintain, which simplifies the data integration process for companies.
  
  
• The centralized error logging system allows users to locate errors in a timely manner and correct them.
  
  
• The tool can convert data from an application to another format, as it serves as one of the most powerful data transformation solutions.
  
  
• PowerCenter can also serve as middleware between two applications.
  
  
• The solution offers both parallel processing and load balancing.
  
  
• PowerCenter is a tool with a high level of security, which also minimizes essential administration activities.
  
  
• The solution ensures the quality of information, as it does not allow invalid or unwanted data to be uploaded to the source.

Reviews from Real Users

Yahya T., a developer and architect at L'Oreal, says the product is stable, provides good support, and integrating it with other systems is very fast.

Mohamed E., a senior manager for Data management and data governance at a tech company, says PowerCenter is stable, mature, and offers flexibility in building the pipeline and has a drag-and-drop mode because it's GUI-based; technical support is brilliant.

Oracle GoldenGate is a real-time data integration and database replication solution. It can detect data events and route them across networks at very low latencies and integrates well with 100s of combinations of non-Oracle databases, data stores, and clouds.

Oracle GoldenGate Features

Oracle GoldenGate has many valuable key features, including:

• Simple to use web interface
• Fast and easy installation or provisioning
• Command line access via AdminClient that can run anywhere
• RESTful APIs for DevOps
• Offers built-in monitoring but also can be easily adapted to roll your own monitoring
• APIs are protected by Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) authentication.

Oracle GoldenGate Benefits

Some of the benefits of using Oracle GoldenGate include:

• Oracle GoldenGate is deeply integrated with the Oracle Database (logging, redo, backup and recovery layer, security, administration, data guard, data vault, autonomous database etc.).
  
  
• It is the most stable, performant, and reliable CDC / replication solution for Oracle.
  
  
• High performance: Oracle GoldenGate is capable of sub-second latency for data movement. featuring low impact capture, routing, transformation, and delivery of transactional data.
  
  
• GoldenGate is the only CDC / replication tool that keeps pace with new and emerging innovations (security, features, data types, etc) in the core Oracle Database.
  
  
• The solution supports a wide range of use cases, from conventional OLTP data replication and high availability to data lake ingestion or multi-cloud ingestion, SaaS application replication, and messaging replication.
• GoldenGate is the only CDC / replication technology certified for Exadata, Exadata Cloud Service, and Exadata Cloud at Customer.
  
  
• For fault-tolerance, GoldenGate has its own mechanism to keep track of how much work is completed and how much is pending. This mechanism is independent of any database and ensures, with the help of automatic gap-resolution, that no data loss occurs.
  
  
• GoldenGate uses its own proprietary format files for keeping the committed data coming from the source database, making it independently functional irrespective of the database in use.
  
  
• To maintain the performance and consistency, only committed data is sent. Uncommitted data is captured by GoldenGate, but is discarded after receiving a Rollback.
  
  
• With GoldenGate, data sending is in “near real time,” which reduces the possibility of latency.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by Oracle GoldenGate users.

PeerSpot user Steve-J., Cloud Migration Software Consultant - UK & EMEA at 1PLACE, says, "What I have found the most valuable about GoldenGate is that it does real-time and no-downtime migrations. Its migrations are fast. There are not many tools like it on the marketplace."

Pinak S., Senior Manager of System and Database at ESL, mentions, “We like how in GoldenGate the heterogeneous database is supported. Sometimes the client actually needs a schedule and needs to ensure the state of databases for reporting purposes. With that in mind, we have been able to configure GoldenGate for certain schema. The solution is quite stable. They've recently improved the ease of implementation.”

A Database Administrator at a manufacturing company explains, "It moves the data as you set it up, and it works. I am also very impressed with its stability and scalability. It is not super feature-rich, but the new releases have more functionality. It recently had more native integrations with Oracle Database. If you are using it against an Oracle database, it has a lot more functionality."

An Oracle ERP DBA Consultant - Oracle Super Cluster T5-8 Admin at a government comments, "GoldenGate can connect and collect data from multiple sources, such as SQL Server."