Oracle GoldenGate Reviews

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.

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.

The most valuable features of Oracle GoldenGate are the schema application and performance.

Oracle GoldenGate could improve the price.

I have been using Oracle GoldenGate for approximately four years.

We did not face any challenges with the stability of Oracle GoldenGate.

Oracle GoldenGate is scalable.

We have four people using the solution in my company.

The technical support from Oracle GoldenGate is excellent. However, we are running out of support because our licenses are expiring.

We are not using Oracle GoldenGate for high-volume transactional systems which made the deployment not difficult. Moving forward we might integrate with high volume transactions systems and we could run into some challenges.

The price of Oracle GoldenGate should be lowered. It is expensive compared to other solutions.

My advice to others is Oracle GoldenGate is one of the best solutions. However, when you choose a CDC solution you need to compare your existing environment and the compatibility with those tools. Within an Oracle-based environment where the core systems are running, Oracle GoldenGate was suitable for us.

I rate Oracle GoldenGate a seven 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. 

I am part of a consulting firm and we build database solutions for our customers. Oracle GoldenGate is one of the products that we assist our clients with.

It is primarily used to replicate data from the main database to a backup server.

The most valuable feature is data replication capability.

It should be easier to integrate this solution with non-Oracle databases, including cloud-based solutions hosted on Azure.

One of our clients began using Oracle GoldenGate in 2013 and a second client started with it in 2018.

Oracle GoldenGate is pretty much stable.

I haven't encountered any issues in terms of scalability.  We are working with solutions where there is not much in terms of scope.

Technical support from Oracle is good. We were able to get help and good advice from them.

The initial setup was complex. It took a lot of time to get it stabilized.

The price of this solution is good.

Oracle GoldenGate is a product that I would recommend.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The solution is used for migrating and syncing data between heterogeneous systems.

I like that the product transforms data and provides real-time applications.

There are a lot of bugs in the solution.

I have been using the solution for more than ten years.

I rate the stability an eight out of ten. The product has a lot of bugs.

I rate the tool’s scalability an eight out of ten. Scaling the tool is not that difficult. Any organization can use the solution.

The initial setup is simple.

I deploy the solution myself for my clients.

The tool is moderately priced. The pricing is simple for a big organization. The solution would be costly for a small organization. I rate the pricing a five or six out of ten.

I have not used any other products. GoldenGate is a nice product. I would recommend the solution to people looking for real-time data applications between heterogeneous or homogenous systems. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

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.