Oracle University Podcast

• Oracle GoldenGate Installation

  Installing Oracle GoldenGate 23ai is more than just running a setup file—it’s about preparing your system for efficient, reliable data replication. In this episode, Lois Houston and Nikita welcome back Nick Wagner to break down system requirements, storage considerations, and best practices for installing GoldenGate.   You’ll learn how to optimize disk space, manage trail files, and configure network settings to ensure a smooth installation.   Oracle GoldenGate 23ai: Fundamentals: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-goldengate-23ai-fundamentals/145884/237273 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   -------------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started! 00:25 Nikita: Hello and welcome to Oracle University Podcast! I’m Nikita Abraham, Team Lead of Editorial Services with Oracle University, and I’m joined by Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs.  Lois: Hi there! Last week, we took a close look at the security strategies of Oracle GoldenGate 23ai. In this episode, we’ll discuss all aspects of installing GoldenGate. 00:48 Nikita: That’s right, Lois. And back with us today is Nick Wagner, Senior Director of Product Management for GoldenGate at Oracle. Hi Nick! I’m going to get straight into it. What are the system requirements for a typical GoldenGate installation? Nick: As far as system requirements, we're going to split that into two sections. We've got an operating system requirements and a storage requirements. So with memory and disk, and I know that this isn't the answer you want, but the answer is that it varies. With GoldenGate, the amount of CPU usage that is required depends on the number of extracts and replicats. It also depends on the number of threads that you're going to be using for those replicats. Same thing with RAM and disk usage. That's going to vary on the transaction sizes and the number of long running transactions. 01:35 Lois: And how does the recovery process in GoldenGate impact system resources?  Nick: You've got two things that help the extract recovery. You've got the bonded recovery that will store transactions over a certain length of time to disk. It also has a cache manager setting that determines what gets written to disk as part of open transactions. It's not just the simple answer as, oh, it needs this much space. GoldenGate also needs to store trail files for the data that it's moving across. So if there's network latency, or if you expect a certain network outage, or you have certain SLAs for the target database that may not be met, you need to make sure that GoldenGate has enough room to store its trail files as it's writing them. The good news about all this is that you can track it. You can use parameters to set them. And we do have some metrics that we'll provide to you on how to size these environments. So a couple of things on the disk usage. The actual installation of GoldenGate is about 1 to 1.5 gig in size, depending on which version of GoldenGate you're going to be using and what database. The trail files themselves, they default to 500 megabytes apiece. A lot of customers keep them on disk longer than they're necessary, and so there's all sorts of purging options available in GoldenGate. But you can set up purge rules to say, hey, I want to get rid of my trail files as soon as they're not needed anymore. But you can also say, you know what? I want to keep my trail files around for x number of days, even if they're not needed. That way they can be rebuilt. I can restore from any previous point in time. 03:15 Nikita: Let’s talk a bit more about trail files. How do these files grow and what settings can users adjust to manage their storage efficiently? Nick: The trail files grow at about 30% to 35% of the generated redo log data. So if I'm generating 100 gigabytes of redo an hour, then you can expect the trail files to be anywhere from 30 to 35 gigabytes an hour of generated data. And this is if you're replicating everything. Again, GoldenGate's got so many different options. There's so many different ways to use it. In some cases, if you're going to a distributed applications and analytics environment, like a Databricks or a Snowflake, you might want to write more information to the trail file than what's necessary. Maybe I want additional information, such as when this change happened, who the user was that made that change. I can add specific token data. You can also tell GoldenGate to log additional records or additional columns to the trail file that may not have been changed. So I can always say, hey, GoldenGate, replicate and store the entire before and after image of every single row change to your trail file, even if those columns didn't change. And so there's a lot of different ways to do it there. But generally speaking, the default settings, you're looking at about 30% to 35% of the generated redo log value. System swap can fill up quickly. You do want this as a dedicated disk as well. System swap is often used for just handling of the changes, as GoldenGate flushes data from memory down to disk. These are controlled by a couple of parameters. So because GoldenGate is only writing committed activity to the trail file, the log reader inside the database is actually giving GoldenGate not only committed activity but uncommitted activity, too. And this is so it can stay very high speed and very low latency. 05:17 Lois: So, what are the parameters? Nick: There's a cache manager overall feature, and there's a cache directory. That directory controls where that data is actually stored, so you can specify the location of the uncommitted transactions. You can also specify the cache size. And there's not only memory settings here, but there's also disk settings. So you can say, hey, once a cache size exceeds a certain memory usage, then start flushing to disk, which is going to be slower. This is for systems that maybe have less memory but more high-speed disk. You can optimize these parameters as necessary. 05:53 Nikita: And how does GoldenGate adjust these parameters? Nick: For most environments, you're just going to leave them alone. They're automatically configured to look at the system memory available on that system and not use it all. And then as soon as necessary, it'll overflow to disk. There's also intelligent settings built within these parameters and within the cache manager itself that if it starts seeing a lull in activity or your traditional OLTP type responses to actually free up the memory that it has allocated. Or if it starts seeing more activity around data warehousing type things where you're doing large transactions, it'll actually hold on to memory a little bit longer. So it kinda learns as it goes through your environment and starts replicating data. 06:37 Lois: Is there anything else you think we should talk about before we move on to installing GoldenGate?  Nick: There's a couple additional things you need to think of with the network as well. So when you're deploying GoldenGate, you definitely want it to use the fastest network.  GoldenGate can also use a reverse proxy, especially important with microservices. Reverse proxy, typically we recommend Nginx. And it allows you to access any of the GoldenGate microservices using a single port.  GoldenGate also needs either host names or IP addresses to do its communication and to ensure the system is available. It does a lot of communication through TCP and IP as well as WSS. And then it also handles firewalls. So you want to make sure that the firewalls are open for ingress and egress for GoldenGate, too. There's a couple of different privileges that GoldenGate needs when you go to install it. You'll want to make sure that GoldenGate has the ability to write to the home where you're installing it. That's kind of obvious, but we need to say it anyways. There's a utility called oggca.sh. That's the GoldenGate Configuration Assistant that allows you to set up your first deployments and manage additional deployments. That needs permissions to write to the directories where you're going to be creating the new deployments. The extract process needs connection and permissions to read the transaction logs or backups. This is not important for Oracle, but for non-Oracle it is. And then we also recommend a dedicated database user for the extract and replicat connections. 08:15 Are you keen to stay ahead in today's fast-paced world? We’ve got your back! Each quarter, Oracle rolls out game-changing updates to its Fusion Cloud Applications. And to make sure you’re always in the know, we offer New Features courses that give you an insider’s look at all of the latest advancements. Don't miss out! Head over to mylearn.oracle.com to get started. 08:41 Nikita: Welcome back! So Nick, how do we get started with the installation?  Nick: So when we go to the install, the first thing you're going to do is go ahead and go to Oracle's website and download the software. Because of the way that GoldenGate works, there's only a couple moving parts. You saw the microservices. There's five or six of them. You have your extract, your replicat, your distribution service, trail files. There's not a lot of moving components. So if something does go wrong, usually it affects multiple customers. And so it's very important that when you go to install GoldenGate, you're using the most recent bundle patch. And you can find this within My Oracle Support. It's not always available directly from OTN or from the Oracle e-delivery website. You can still get them there, but we really want people going to My Oracle Support to download the most recent version. There's a couple of environment variables and certificates that you'll set up as well. And then you'll run the Configuration Assistant to create your deployments.  09:44 Lois: Thanks, Nick, for taking us though the installation of GoldenGate. Because these are highly UI-driven topics, we recommend that you take a deep dive into the GoldenGate 23ai Fundamentals course, available on mylearn.oracle.com. Nikita: In our next episode, we’ll talk about the Extract process. Until then, this is Nikita Abraham… Lois: And Lois Houston signing off! 10:08 That’s all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We’d also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

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  10:37
• Oracle GoldenGate 23ai Security Strategies

  GoldenGate 23ai takes security seriously, and this episode unpacks everything you need to know. GoldenGate expert Nick Wagner breaks down how authentication, access roles, and encryption protect your data.   Learn how GoldenGate integrates with identity providers, secures communication, and keeps passwords out of storage. Understand how trail files work, why they only store committed data, and how recovery processes prevent data loss.   Whether you manage replication or just want to tighten security, this episode gives you the details to lock things down without slowing operations.   Oracle GoldenGate 23ai: Fundamentals: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-goldengate-23ai-fundamentals/145884/237273 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   --------------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started! 00:25 Lois: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I’m Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Team Lead: Editorial Services.  Nikita: Welcome, everyone! This is our fourth episode on Oracle GoldenGate 23ai. Last week, we discussed the terminology, different processes and what they do, and the architecture of the product at a high level. Today, we have Nick Wagner back with us to talk about the security strategies of GoldenGate. 00:56 Lois: As you know by now, Nick is a Senior Director of Product Management for GoldenGate at Oracle. He’s played a key role as one of the product designers behind the latest version of GoldenGate. Hi Nick! Thank you for joining us again. Can you tell us how GoldenGate takes care of data security? Nick: So GoldenGate authentication and authorization is done in a couple of different ways. First, we have user credentials for GoldenGate for not only the source and target databases, but also for GoldenGate itself. We have integration with third-party identity management products, and everything that GoldenGate does can be secured. 01:32 Nikita: And we must have some access roles, right? Nick: There's four roles built into the GoldenGate product. You have your security role, administrator, operator, and user. They're all hierarchical. The most important one is the security user. This user is going to be the one that provides the administrative tasks. This user is able to actually create additional users and assign roles within the product. So do not lose this password and this user is extremely important. You probably don't want to use this security user as your everyday user. That would be your administrator. The administrator role is able to perform all administrative tasks within GoldenGate. So not only can they go in and create new extracts, create new replicats, create new distribution services, but they can also start and stop them. And that's where the operator role is and the user role. So the operator role allows you to go in and start/stop processes, but you can't create any new ones, which is kind of important. So this user would be the one that could go in and suspend activity. They could restart activity. But they can't actually add objects to replication. The user role is really a read-only role. They can come in. They can see what's going on. They can look at the log files. They can look at the alerts. They can look at all the watches and see exactly what GoldenGate is doing. But they're unable to make any changes to the product itself. 02:54 Lois: You mentioned the roles are hierarchical in nature. What does that mean? Nick: So anything that the user role does can be done by the operator. Anything that the operator and user roles can do can be done by the administrator. And anything that the user, operator, and administrator roles do can be done by the security role. 03:11 Lois: Ok. So, is there a single sign-on available for GoldenGate? Nick: We also have a password plugin for GoldenGate Connections. A lot of customers have asked for integration with whatever their single sign-on utility is, and so GoldenGate now has that with GoldenGate 23ai. So these are customer-created entities. So, we have some examples that you can use in our documentation on how to set up an identity provider or a third-party identity provider with GoldenGate. And this allows you to ensure that your corporate standards are met. As we started looking into this, as we started designing it, every single customer wanted something different. And so instead of trying to meet the needs for every customer and every possible combination of security credentials, we want you to be able to design it the way you need it. The passwords are never stored. They're only retrieved from the identity provider by the plugin itself. 04:05 Nikita: That’s a pretty important security aspect…that when it’s time to authenticate a user, we go to the identity provider. Nick: We're going to connect in and see if that password is matching. And only then do we use it. And as soon as we detect that it's matched, that password is removed. And then for the extract and replicats themselves, you can also use it for the database, data source, and data target connections, as well as for the GoldenGate users. So, it is a full-featured plugin. So, our identity provider plugin works with IAM as well as OAM. These are your standard identity manager authentication methods. The standard one is OAuth 2, as well as OIDC. And any Identity Manager that uses that is able to integrate with GoldenGate. 04:52 Lois: And how does this work? Nick: The way that it works is pretty straightforward. Once the user logs into the database, we're going to hand off authentication to the identity provider. Once the identity provider has validated that user's identity and their credentials, then it comes back to GoldenGate and says that user is able to log in to either GoldenGate or the application or the database. Once the user is logged in, we get that confirmation that's been sent out and they can continue working through GoldenGate. So, it's very straightforward on how it works. There's also a nice little UI that will help set up each additional user within those systems. All the communication is also secured as well. So any communication done through any of the GoldenGate services is encrypted using HTTPS. All the REST calls themselves are all done using HTTPS as well. All the data protection calls and all the communication across the network when we send data across a distribution service is encrypted using a secure WebSocket. And there's also trail file encryption at the operating system level for data at REST. So, this really gives you the full level of encryption for customers that need that high-end security. GoldenGate does have an option for FIPS 140-2 compliance as well. So that's even a further step for most of those customers. 06:12 Nikita: That’s impressive! Because we want to maintain the highest security standards, right? Especially when dealing with sensitive information. I now want to move on to trail files. In our last episode, we briefly spoke about how they serve as logs that record and track changes made to data. But what more can you tell us about them, Nick? Nick: There's two different processes that write to the trail files. The extract process will write to the trail file and the receiver service will write to the trail file. The extract process is going to write to the trail file as it's pulling data out of that source database. Now, the extract process is controlled by a parameter file, that says, hey, here's the exact changes that I'm going to be pulling out. Here's the tables. Here's the rows that I want. As it's pulling that data out and writing it to the trail files, it's ensuring that those trail files have enough information so that the replicat process can actually construct a SQL statement and apply that change to that target platform. And so there's a lot of ways to change what's actually stored in those trail files and how it's handled. The trail files can also be used for initial loads. So when we do the initial load through GoldenGate, we can grab and write out the data for those tables, and that excludes the change data. So initial loads is pulling the data directly from the tables themselves, whereas ongoing replication is pulling it from the transaction logs. 07:38 Lois: But do we need to worry about rollbacks? Nick: Our trail files contain committed data only and all data is sequential. So this is two important things. Because it contains committed data only, we don't need to worry about rollbacks. We also don't need to worry about position within that trail file because we know all data is sequential. And so as we're reading through the trail file, we know that anything that's written in a prior location in that trial file was committed prior to something else. And as we get into the recovery aspects of GoldenGate, this will all make a lot more sense. 08:13 Lois: Before we do that, can you tell us about the naming of trail files? Nick: The trail files as far as naming, because these do reside on the operating system, you start with a two-letter trail file abbreviation and then a nine-digit sequential value. So, you almost look at it as like an archive log from Oracle, where we have a prefix and then an affix, which is numeric. Same kind of thing. So, we have our two-letter, in this case, an ab, and then we have a nine-digit number. 08:47 Transform the way you work with Oracle Database 23ai! This cutting-edge technology brings the power of AI directly to your data, making it easier to build powerful applications and manage critical workloads. Want to learn more about Database 23ai? Visit mylearn.oracle.com to pick from our range of courses and enroll today! 09:12 Nikita: Welcome back! Ok, Nick. Let’s get into the GoldenGate recovery process. Nick: When we start looking at the GoldenGate recovery process, it essentially makes GoldenGate kind of point-in-time like. So on that source database, you have your extract process that's going to be capturing data from the transaction logs. In the case of Oracle, the Oracle Database is actually going to be reading those transaction logs from us and passing the change records directly to GoldenGate. We call them an LCR, Logical Change Record. And so the integrated extract and GoldenGate, the extract portion tells the database, hey, I'm now going to be interested in the following list of tables. And it gives a list of tables to that internal component, the log mining engine within the database. And it says, OK, I'm now pulling data for those tables and I'm going to send you those table changes. And so as the extract process gets sent those changes, it's going to have checkpoint information. So not only does it know where it was pulling data from out of that source database, but what it's also writing to the trail file. The trail files themselves are all sequential and they have only committed data, as we talked about earlier. The distribution service has checkpoint information that says, hey, I know where I'm reading from in the previous trail file, and I know what I've sent across the network. The receiver service is the same thing. It knows what it's receiving, as well as what it's written to the trail file and the target system. The replicat also has a checkpoint. It knows where it's reading from in the trail file, and then it knows what it's been applying into that target database.  This is where things start to become a little complicated. Our replicat process in most cases are parallel, so it'll have multiple threads applying data into that target database. Each of those threads is applying different transactions. And because of the way that the parallelism works in the replicat process, you can actually get situations where one replicat thread might be applying a transaction higher than another thread. And so you can eliminate that sequential or serial aspect of it, and we can get very high throughput speeds to the replicat. But it means that the checkpoint needs to be kind of smart enough to know how to rebuild itself if something fails. 11:32 Lois: Ok, sorry Nick, but can you go through that again? Maybe we can work backwards this time?  Nick: If the replicat process fails, when it comes back up, it's going to look to its checkpoint tables inside that target database. These checkpoint tables keep track of where each thread was at when it crashed. And so when the replicat process restarts, it goes, oh, I was applying these threads at this location in these SCNs. It'll then go and read from the trail file and say, hey, let me rebuild that data and it only applies transactions that it hasn't applied yet to that target system. There is a synchronized replicat command as well that will tell a crashed replicat to say, hey, bring all your threads up to the same high watermark. It does that process automatically as it restarts and continues normal replication. But there is an option to do it just by itself too. So that's how the replicat kind of repairs and recovers itself. It'll simply look at the trail files. Now, let's say that the replicat crashed, and it goes to read from the trail files when it restarts and that trail profile is missing. It'll actually communicate to the distribution, or excuse me, to the receiver service and say, hey, receiver service, I don't have this trail file. Can you bring it back for me? And the receiver service will communicate downstream and say, hey, distribution service, I need you to resend me trail find number 6. And so the distribution service will resend that trail file so that the replicat can reprocess it. So it's often nice to have redundant environments with GoldenGate so we can have those trail files kind of around for availability. 13:13 Nikita: What if one of these files gets corrupted? Nick: If one of those trail files is corrupt, let's say that a trail file on the target site became corrupt and the replicat can't read from it for one reason or another. Simply stop the replicat process, delete the corrupt trail file, restart the replicat process, and now it's going to rebuild that trail file from scratch based on the information from the source GoldenGate environment. And so it's very recoverable. Handles it all very well. 13:40 Nikita: And can the extract process bounce back in the same way? Nick: The extract process can also recover in a similar way. So if the extract process crashes, when it restarts itself, there's a number of things that it does. The first thing is it has to rebuild any open transactions. So it keeps all sorts of checkpoint information about the oldest transaction that it's keeping track of, any open transactions that haven't been committed, and any other transactions that have been committed that it's already written to the trail file. So as it's reprocessing that data, it knows exactly what it's committed to trail and what hasn't been committed. And there's a number of ways that it does this.  There's two main components here. One of them is called bounded recovery. Bounded recovery will allow you to set a time limit on transactions that span a certain length of time that they'll actually get flushed out to disk on that GoldenGate Hub. And that way it'll reduce the amount of time it takes GoldenGate to restart the extract process. And the other component is cache manager. Cache manager stores uncommitted transactions. And so it's a very elegant way of rebuilding itself from any kind of failure. You can also set up restart profiles so that if any process does crash, the GoldenGate service manager can automatically restart that service an x number of times across y time span. So if I say, hey, if my extract crashes, then attempt to restart it 100 times every 5 seconds. So there's a lot of things that you can do there to make it really nice and automatic repair itself and automatically resilient.  15:18 Lois: Well, that brings us to the end of this episode. Thank you, Nick, for going through the security strategies and recovery processes in such detail. Next week, we’ll look at the installation of GoldenGate. Nikita: And if you want to learn more about the topics we discussed today, head over to mylearn.oracle.com and take a look at the Oracle GoldenGate 23ai Fundamentals course. Until next time, this is Nikita Abraham… Lois: And Lois Houston signing off! 15:44 That’s all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We’d also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

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  16:13
• GoldenGate 23ai: Terminology & Architecture

  In this episode, Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Nick Wagner, focus on GoldenGate’s terminology and architectural evolution.   Nick defines source and target systems, which are crucial for data replication, and then moves on to explain the data extraction and replication processes.   He also talks about the new microservices architecture, which replaces the classic architecture, offering benefits like simplified management, enhanced security, and a user-friendly interface. Nick highlights how this architecture facilitates easy upgrades and provides a streamlined experience for administrators.   Oracle GoldenGate 23ai: Fundamentals: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-goldengate-23ai-fundamentals/145884/237273 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   ---------------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:   00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started! 00:25 Nikita: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I’m Nikita Abraham, Team Lead of Editorial Services with Oracle University, and with me is Lois Houston: Director of Innovation Programs. Lois: Hi there! Thanks for joining us again as we make our way through Oracle GoldenGate 23ai. Last week, we discussed all the new features introduced in 23ai and today, we’ll move on to the terminology, the different processes and what they do, and the architecture of the product at a high level. 00:56 Nikita: Back with us is Nick Wagner, Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle GoldenGate. Hi Nick! Let’s get into some of the terminology. What do we actually call stuff in GoldenGate? Nick: Within GoldenGate, we have our source systems and our target systems. The source is where we're going to be capturing data from, the targets, where we're going to be applying data into. And when we start talking about things like active-active or setting up GoldenGate for high availability, where your source can also be your target, it does become a little bit more complex. And so in some of those cases, we might refer to things as East and West, or America and Europe, or different versions of that. We also have a couple of different things within the product itself. We have what we call our Extract and our Replicat. The Extract is going to be the process that pulls the data out of the database, our capture technology. Our Replicat’s going to be the one that applies the data into the target system, or you can also look at it as a push technology. We have what we call our Distribution Path. Our Distribution Path is going to be how we're sending the data across the network. A lot of times when customers run GoldenGate, they don't have the luxury of just having a single server of GoldenGate that can pull data from one database and push data into another one. They need to set up multiple hops of that data. And so in that case, we would use what we call a Distribution Path to send that data from one system to the next. We also have what we call a Target Initiated Path. It's kind of a subset of your Distribution Path, but it allows you to communicate from a less secure environment into a more secure environment.  02:33 Lois: Nick, what about parameter names. I’ve seen them in uppercase…title case…does that matter?  Nick: GoldenGate has a lot of parameters. This is something you'll see all over the place within GoldenGate itself.  These parameters are in your Extract and Replicat parameter files during your distribution path parameter files. Parameters for GoldenGate are case insensitive.  Within your own environments, you can set it up to have lowercase, mixed case, whatever you want, but just be aware that they are case insensitive. GoldenGate doesn't care, it's just for readability. And then we also have something called trail files. Trail files is where GoldenGate stores all the data before we're able to apply it into that target system. Think about it as our queuing mechanism, and we're queuing everything outside the database so that we're not overloading those database environments. And that's some of the terminology for the product itself. We also have microservices within GoldenGate. 03:31 Nikita: And at the heart of everything is the Service Manager, right? Talk to us about what it is and what it does. Nick: The service manager is responsible for making sure that everything else is up and running. If you are familiar with GoldenGate classic architecture, this is kind of similar to a GoldenGate manager where that process was there to make sure that processes were running the trail files, or excuse me, that certain error logs were getting written out. If a process went down, the manager would restart that process. The service manager is performing a lot of those same functions. Now attached to the service manager, we have our configuration service. This is new in GoldenGate 23ai. This configuration service is going to allow you to set up GoldenGate for highly available environments. So you can build HA into GoldenGate itself using the configuration service. 04:22 Lois: And what does this configuration service do? Nick: This configuration service essentially moves the checkpoint files that used to be on disk into a database so that everything can be stored inside of a database.  Also attached to the service manager, we have the performance metric service. This is a service that is going to be gathering all the performance metrics of GoldenGate. So it's going to tell you how fast things are going, what the latencies are, how many bytes per second we're reading from, the transaction logs or writing to our trail files. How quickly a distribution path is sending data across a network. If you want to know any of your lag information, you'll get it from the performance metrics server. We also have the receiver service and the distribution service. These two work hand in hand to establish network communication between two GoldenGate environments. So on what we call our source system, we have a distribution service that's going to send the data to our target system. On the target system, a receiver service is going to receive that data and then rewrite the trail files. We also have the administration service that's responsible for authentication and authorization of the users, as well as making sure that people have access to the right information. 05:33 Nikita: Ok. Moving on the deployment, how is GoldenGate actually deployed, Nick? Nick: GoldenGate is kinda nice. So the way that the product is installed is you install the GoldenGate environment and that's what we call our service manager deployment under a specific GoldenGate home. So the software binaries themselves get installed under a home, we'll say U01/OGG23AI. Now once I've installed GoldenGate once, that's my OGG home. I can now have any number of service managers and deployments tied to that same home.  06:11 Lois: Ok, let’s work with an example to make this simpler. Let’s say I've got a service manager that's going be responsible for three different deployments: Accounting, Finance, and Sales. Nick: Each of these deployments is going to reside in its own directory. Each of these deployments is going to have its own set of microservices. And so this also means that each of these deployments can have their own set of users. So the people that access the GoldenGate accounting deployment can be different than the ones that access the sales deployment. This means with this distribution of roles that I can have somebody come in and administer the sales database, but they wouldn't have any information or any access to accounting or finance. And this is very important, it allows you to really pull that information apart and separate it. Each of these environments also has their own set of parameter files, Extract process, Replicat process, distribution services, and everything. So it's a very nice way of splitting things up, but all having them tied to the same GoldenGate home system. And this home is very important. So I can take a deployment, let's say my finance deployment, and if I want to move it to a new GoldenGate home and that GoldenGate home is a different version, like let's say that my original home is 23.4, my new GoldenGate home is 23.7, I simply stop that GoldenGate deployment. I stopped at a finance deployment. I changed its OGG home from 23.4 to 23.7. I restart the deployment, that deployment is automatically upgraded to the new environment and attached to the new system. So it makes upgrading very, very simple, very easy, very elegant. 07:53 Nikita: Ok. So, we’ve spoken about the services…some of the terminology. Let’s get into the architecture next. Nick: So when we talk about the architecture for GoldenGate, we used to have two different architectures. We had a classic architecture and a microservices architecture. Classic architecture was something that's been around since the very beginning of GoldenGate in the late '90s. We announced that, that architecture was deprecated in 19c. And Oracle deprecated means that feature is no longer going to be enhanced and it'll be patched selectively. And at some point in the future, it'll be entirely desupported. Well, GoldenGate 23ai is that future. And so in 23ai, the classic architecture is desupported, that means that it's no longer in the build at all. And so it's just microservices architecture. 08:41 Lois: Is there a tool to assist with this migration?  Nick: We do have a migration utility that will convert an old classic architecture into the new microservices architecture. But there is quite a bit of learning curve to the new microservices architecture. So it's important that we go through how it works in the changes. 09:04 Are you looking to optimize your implementation strategies and improve efficiency? We have a solution for you! Our new Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Foundations training and certification program. You’ll learn to leverage Oracle Modern Best Practice (OMBP) to re-imagine business processes using advanced technologies in Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications such as AI, mobile, analytics, and more. Visit mylearn.oracle.com to get started today.  09:37 Nikita: Welcome back! Nick, what are the benefits of this microservices architecture?  Nick: It's got that simplified lifecycle for patching and upgrading. A lot of the GoldenGate patches that you get, especially these bundle patches, are complete installs as well. So you can go into My Oracle Support and download a complete install of a patch and that way, you don't have to use old patch to apply them. The only time you'll be using old patch is for one-off patches or smaller patches that need to be applied to your GoldenGate system. The microservices product has the same trusted Capture and Apply process that Classic did. There's almost no changes between the two except on how they communicate with their parent processes. And so the same logic that you use to pull data from Oracle or to apply data into Oracle is all the same. 10:25 Lois: And has the interface been upgraded as well? Nick: We've added a really nice, easy to use web interface for the microservices version of GoldenGate. Not only is this web interface work with all your standard browsers, but it's also mobile friendly too. So I can actually control and administer GoldenGate right through my mobile device. It also has new secure remote administration. This is something that the classic architecture was really missing. And so in the classic architecture, to use the command line interface, you had to log into the database server where GoldenGate was installed. Now, the command line interface, as well as the web interface and the REST API, all use remote administration and authentication. So that means that I can install the new command line interface or what we call admin client on my laptop locally and I can connect to any GoldenGate deployment as long as I have the username and password for that deployment. It's also more secure. GoldenGate microservices can also be deployed on premise or in OCI as a service and now also on these third-party clouds like Azure and Google Cloud. And it's also easier for developers to integrate in with the APIs themselves. Everything that GoldenGate does through the admin client as well as the web UI can all be traced. The REST API calls for GoldenGate are all fully published so you can get them right directly from the documentation, you can build your own web interface if you want to. So it makes it very easy. The REST APIs are also streamlined. With a single REST API call, I can do something like add an Extract process, create it, set up my parameter file, and set up the trail files all with a single API command. Whereas in the past, it would require multiple command line interface commands to do that same thing. So it's extremely elegant, very advanced. 12:16 Nikita: What does the microservices architecture look like? I know it’s a bit complicated when we’re not actually looking at a diagram of it, but just a high level, can you explain the different parts of it? Nick: It's pretty straightforward. But essentially what you've got on each system is a service manager. That service manager is then going to have a number of processes or services beneath it. It'll have the configuration service that stores the checkpoint information for GoldenGate. It'll have the administrative service for the authentication and users, the distribution service to send the data across a network, a receiver service to receive that information, performance metrics to get the performance statistics out of GoldenGate. And then of course, you also have your Extracts and Replicats that capture and apply technology. Each of those Extracts and Replicats will then connect to a database on the Extract side of things. That Extract is going to write to trail files. Those trail files are then going to be sent across the network where they're rebuilt on the target system and the Replicat’s going to consume them and apply them into the target database. So the Replicat behaves almost like an end user. So it's taking that trail file data and simply converting it to DML operations, insert, update, delete, or a DDL operation in the case of Oracle, alter table, create table, et cetera, to go into that target database.   13:39 Lois: To look at a diagram of this architecture and learn about it in more detail, check out the Oracle GoldenGate 23ai Fundamentals course on mylearn.oracle.com. So, Nick, if I’m looking to deploy GoldenGate, what should I primarily keep in mind? Nick: So as you go to install GoldenGate and you look at a deployment, there's a couple of important environment variables that you want to make sure you're aware of. So one of the first ones is your OGG_Home. This environment variable is extremely important. This is the location of the GoldenGate software itself. And I want to stress how important it is to always use version numbers when you're setting up your GoldenGate home. When you go to install the software, if you're installing GoldenGate 23.5, use 23.5 within the home directory structure. If you're installing GoldenGate 23.7, use 23.7 inside that directory structure. 14:33 Nikita: Right… that way I’ll always know which versions are which, and it’ll make it really easy to upgrade and move from one version to the next. Ok, got it. What else, Nick? Nick: There's a couple other important directories. You have your OGG_ETC_HOME. This is where things like the configuration files are going to reside, parameter files, all your certificates for security, including the wallets where we store the credentials for not only the database accounts, but also for the GoldenGate user accounts as well. We have our GoldenGate variable home directory or VAR home. This is where all the GoldenGate log files are residing. And these are the log files that allow you to see what's going on in GoldenGate for auditing purposes. Anytime anybody makes a change to GoldenGate, you're going to see information go into the log files on what was happening and how it was working and what they did, what time they did, what command they issued. Another big important feature about these log files is it also gives you error information and troubleshooting details. So if you ever need to find out what happened in GoldenGate, what went wrong, you would look at these log files to find out that information. And then you also have your OGG_DATA_HOME. This is where those trail files are going to go. Essentially, this is kind of the queuing or overflow for GoldenGate. There's a couple of other additional components. We've got the admin client. This is our command line utility. If you don't want to use a web browser or prefer a command line utility, you can use the admin client. The admin client is also fully scriptable. So if you wanted to write scripts that would go off and automate things in GoldenGate, you can do that. A lot of customers did that with GGSCI in the classic architecture. You can do the same thing now with the admin client. The other component is the microservices security authentication and authorization services. These handle communication security, especially making sure that any passwords or usernames and everything like that is all encrypted. And instead of using an actual username and password, everything through the product is going to be done through an alias. And then it also handles all the authorization authentication, permissions, user accountability, and roles within GoldenGate. 16:39 Lois: Anything else you’d like to talk about before we wrap up for today, Nick? Nick: I also wanted to take a minute to talk about the REST API. All the microservices provide REST APIs to administer them and all of these are fully documented. They can be used by any client that can make REST API calls. So if you wanted to use Python, cURL, a web browser, you can do that as well. They're all just HTTP or HTTPS calls, get, put, patch, the standard REST API standards. And then GoldenGate does provide our admin client as well as a WebUI that use these REST APIs under the covers if you ever wanted to get a more advanced look at how it works. 17:18 Nikita: Well, that’s all the time we have for today. Thanks for joining us, Nick.  Lois: Yes, thanks Nick. We look forward to having you back next week to talk with us about security strategies and data recovery. Nikita: And if you want to learn more about the topics we discussed today, head over to mylearn.oracle.com and take a look at the Oracle GoldenGate 23ai Fundamentals course. Until next time, this is Nikita Abraham… Lois: And Lois Houston, signing off!  17:43 That’s all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We’d also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

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  18:13
• Oracle GoldenGate 23ai: New Features & Product Family

  In this episode, Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham continue their deep dive into Oracle GoldenGate 23ai, focusing on its evolution and the extensive features it offers. They are joined once again by Nick Wagner, who provides valuable insights into the product's journey.   Nick talks about the various iterations of Oracle GoldenGate, highlighting the significant advancements from version 12c to the latest 23ai release. The discussion then shifts to the extensive new features in 23ai, including AI-related capabilities, UI enhancements, and database function integration.   Oracle GoldenGate 23ai: Fundamentals: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-goldengate-23ai-fundamentals/145884/237273 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   -----------------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started! 00:25 Lois: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I’m Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Team Lead: Editorial Services.  Nikita: Hi everyone! Last week, we introduced Oracle GoldenGate and its capabilities, and also spoke about GoldenGate 23ai. In today’s episode, we’ll talk about the various iterations of Oracle GoldenGate since its inception. And we’ll also take a look at some new features and the Oracle GoldenGate product family. 00:57 Lois: And we have Nick Wagner back with us. Nick is a Senior Director of Product Management for GoldenGate at Oracle. Hi Nick! I think the last time we had an Oracle University course was when Oracle GoldenGate 12c was out. I’m sure there’s been a lot of advancements since then. Can you walk us through those? Nick: GoldenGate 12.3 introduced the microservices architecture. GoldenGate 18c introduced support for Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse and Autonomous Transaction Processing Databases. In GoldenGate 19c, we added the ability to do cross endian remote capture for Oracle, making it easier to set up the GoldenGate OCI service to capture from environments like Solaris, Spark, and HP-UX and replicate into the Cloud. Also, GoldenGate 19c introduced a simpler process for upgrades and installation of GoldenGate where we released something called a unified build. This means that when you install GoldenGate for a particular database, you don't need to worry about the database version when you install GoldenGate. Prior to this, you would have to install a version-specific and database-specific version of GoldenGate. So this really simplified that whole process. In GoldenGate 23ai, which is where we are now, this really is a huge release.  02:16 Nikita: Yeah, we covered some of the distributed AI features and high availability environments in our last episode. But can you give us an overview of everything that’s in the 23ai release? I know there’s a lot to get into but maybe you could highlight just the major ones? Nick: Within the AI and streaming environments, we've got interoperability for database vector types, heterogeneous capture and apply as well. Again, this is not just replication between Oracle-to-Oracle vector or Postgres to Postgres vector, it is heterogeneous just like the rest of GoldenGate. The entire UI has been redesigned and optimized for high speed. And so we have a lot of customers that have dozens and dozens of extracts and replicats and processes running and it was taking a long time for the UI to refresh those and to show what's going on within those systems. So the UI has been optimized to be able to handle those environments much better. We now have the ability to call database functions directly from call map. And so when you do transformation with GoldenGate, we have about 50 or 60 built-in transformation routines for string conversion, arithmetic operation, date manipulation. But we never had the ability to directly call a database function. 03:28 Lois: And now we do? Nick: So now you can actually call that database function, database stored procedure, database package, return a value and that can be used for transformation within GoldenGate. We have integration with identity providers, being able to use token-based authentication and integrate in with things like Azure Active Directory and your other single sign-on for the GoldenGate product itself. Within Oracle 23ai, there's a number of new features. One of those cool features is something called lock-free reservation columns. So this allows you to have a row, a single row within a table and you can identify a column within that row that's like an inventory column. And you can have multiple different users and multiple different transactions all updating that column within that same exact row at that same time. So you no longer have row-level locking for these reservation columns. And it allows you to do things like shopping carts very easily. If I have 500 widgets to sell, I'm going to let any number of transactions come in and subtract from that inventory column. And then once it gets below a certain point, then I'll start enforcing that row-level locking. 04:43 Lois: That’s really cool… Nick: The one key thing that I wanted to mention here is that because of the way that the lock-free reservations work, you can have multiple transactions open on the same row. This is only supported for Oracle to Oracle. You need to have that same lock-free reservation data type and availability on that target system if GoldenGate is going to replicate into it. 05:05 Nikita: Are there any new features related to the diagnosability and observability of GoldenGate?  Nick: We've improved the AWR reports in Oracle 23ai. There's now seven sections that are specific to Oracle GoldenGate to allow you to really go in and see exactly what the GoldenGate processes are doing and how they're behaving inside the database itself. And there's a Replication Performance Advisor package inside that database, and that's been integrated into the Web UI as well. So now you can actually get information out of the replication advisor package in Oracle directly from the UI without having to log into the database and try to run any database procedures to get it. We've also added the ability to support a per-PDB Extract.  So in the past, when GoldenGate would run on a multitenant database, a multitenant database in Oracle, all the redo data from any pluggable database gets sent to that one redo stream. And so you would have to configure GoldenGate at the container or root level and it would be able to access anything at any PDB. Now, there's better security and better performance by doing what we call per-PDB Extract. And this means that for a single pluggable database, I can have an extract that runs at that database level that's going to capture information just from that pluggable database. 06:22 Lois And what about non-Oracle environments, Nick? Nick: We've also enhanced the non-Oracle environments as well. For example, in Postgres, we've added support for precise instantiation using Postgres snapshots. This eliminates the need to handle collisions when you're doing Postgres to Postgres replication and initial instantiation. On the GoldenGate for big data side, we've renamed that product more aptly to distributed applications in analytics, which is really what it does, and we've added a whole bunch of new features here too. The ability to move data into Databricks, doing Google Pub/Sub delivery. We now have support for XAG within the GoldenGate for distributed applications and analytics. What that means is that now you can follow all of our MAA best practices for GoldenGate for Oracle, but it also works for the DAA product as well, meaning that if it's running on one node of a cluster and that node fails, it'll restart itself on another node in the cluster. We've also added the ability to deliver data to Redis, Google BigQuery, stage and merge functionality for better performance into the BigQuery product. And then we've added a completely new feature, and this is something called streaming data and apps and we're calling it AsyncAPI and CloudEvent data streaming. It's a long name, but what that means is that we now have the ability to publish changes from a GoldenGate trail file out to end users. And so this allows through the Web UI or through the REST API, you can now come into GoldenGate and through the distributed applications and analytics product, actually set up a subscription to a GoldenGate trail file. And so this allows us to push data into messaging environments, or you can simply subscribe to changes and it doesn't have to be the whole trail file, it can just be a subset. You can specify exactly which tables and you can put filters on that. You can also set up your topologies as well. So, it's a really cool feature that we've added here. 08:26 Nikita: Ok, you’ve given us a lot of updates about what GoldenGate can support. But can we also get some specifics? Nick: So as far as what we have, on the Oracle Database side, there's a ton of different Oracle databases we support, including the Autonomous Databases and all the different flavors of them, your Oracle Database Appliance, your Base Database Service within OCI, your of course, Standard and Enterprise Edition, as well as all the different flavors of Exadata, are all supported with GoldenGate. This is all for capture and delivery. And this is all versions as well. GoldenGate supports Oracle 23ai and below. We also have a ton of non-Oracle databases in different Cloud stores. On an non-Oracle side, we support everything from application-specific databases like FairCom DB, all the way to more advanced applications like Snowflake, which there's a vast user base for that. We also support a lot of different cloud stores and these again, are non-Oracle, nonrelational systems, or they can be relational databases. We also support a lot of big data platforms and this is part of the distributed applications and analytics side of things where you have the ability to replicate to different Apache environments, different Cloudera environments. We also support a number of open-source systems, including things like Apache Cassandra, MySQL Community Edition, a lot of different Postgres open source databases along with MariaDB. And then we have a bunch of streaming event products, NoSQL data stores, and even Oracle applications that we support. So there's absolutely a ton of different environments that GoldenGate supports. There are additional Oracle databases that we support and this includes the Oracle Metadata Service, as well as Oracle MySQL, including MySQL HeatWave. Oracle also has Oracle NoSQL Spatial and Graph and times 10 products, which again are all supported by GoldenGate. 10:23 Lois: Wow, that’s a lot of information! Nick: One of the things that we didn't really cover was the different SaaS applications, which we've got like Cerner, Fusion Cloud, Hospitality, Retail, MICROS, Oracle Transportation, JD Edwards, Siebel, and on and on and on.  And again, because of the nature of GoldenGate, it's heterogeneous. Any source can talk to any target. And so it doesn't have to be, oh, I'm pulling from Oracle Fusion Cloud, that means I have to go to an Oracle Database on the target, not necessarily.  10:51 Lois: So, there’s really a massive amount of flexibility built into the system.  11:00 Unlock the power of AI Vector Search with our new course and certification. Get more accurate search results, handle complex datasets easily, and supercharge your data-driven decisions. From now through May 15, 2025, we are waiving the certification exam fee (valued at $245). Visit mylearn.oracle.com to enroll. 11:26 Nikita: Welcome back! Now that we’ve gone through the base product, what other features or products are in the GoldenGate family itself, Nick? Nick: So we have quite a few. We've kind of touched already on GoldenGate for Oracle databases and non-Oracle databases. We also have something called GoldenGate for Mainframe, which right now is covered under the GoldenGate for non-Oracle, but there is a licensing difference there. So that's something to be aware of. We also have the OCI GoldenGate product. We are announcing and we have announced that OCI GoldenGate will also be made available as part of the Oracle Database@Azure and Oracle Database@ Google Cloud partnerships.  And then you'll be able to use that vendor's cloud credits to actually pay for the OCI GoldenGate product. One of the cool things about this is it will have full feature parity with OCI GoldenGate running in OCI. So all the same features, all the same sources and targets, all the same topologies be able to migrate data in and out of those clouds at will, just like you do with OCI GoldenGate today running in OCI.  We have Oracle GoldenGate Free.  This is a completely free edition of GoldenGate to use. It is limited on the number of platforms that it supports as far as sources and targets and the size of the database.  12:45 Lois: But it's a great way for developers to really experience GoldenGate without worrying about a license, right? What’s next, Nick? Nick: We have GoldenGate for Distributed Applications and Analytics, which was formerly called GoldenGate for big data, and that allows us to do all the streaming. That's also where the GoldenGate AsyncAPI integration is done. So in order to publish the GoldenGate trail files or allow people to subscribe to them, it would be covered under the Oracle GoldenGate Distributed Applications and Analytics license. We also have OCI GoldenGate Marketplace, which allows you to run essentially the on-premises version of GoldenGate but within OCI. So a little bit more flexibility there. It also has a hub architecture. So if you need that 99.99% availability, you can get it within the OCI Marketplace environment. We have GoldenGate for Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control, which used to be called Oracle Enterprise Manager. And this allows you to use Enterprise Manager Cloud Control to get all the statistics and details about GoldenGate. So all the reporting information, all the analytics, all the statistics, how fast GoldenGate is replicating, what's the lag, what's the performance of each of the processes, how much data am I sending across a network. All that's available within the plug-in. We also have Oracle GoldenGate Veridata. This is a nice utility and tool that allows you to compare two databases, whether or not GoldenGate is running between them and actually tell you, hey, these two systems are out of sync. And if they are out of sync, it actually allows you to repair the data too. 14:25 Nikita: That’s really valuable…. Nick: And it does this comparison without locking the source or the target tables. The other really cool thing about Veridata is it does this while there's data in flight. So let's say that the GoldenGate lag is 15 or 20 seconds and I want to compare this table that has 10 million rows in it. The Veridata product will go out, run its comparison once. Once that comparison is done the first time, it's then going to have a list of rows that are potentially out of sync. Well, some of those rows could have been moved over or could have been modified during that 10 to 15 second window. And so the next time you run Veridata, it's actually going to go through. It's going to check just those rows that were potentially out of sync to see if they're really out of sync or not. And if it comes back and says, hey, out of those potential rows, there's two out of sync, it'll actually produce a script that allows you to resynchronize those systems and repair them. So it's a very cool product.  15:19 Nikita: What about GoldenGate Stream Analytics? I know you mentioned it in the last episode, but in the context of this discussion, can you tell us a little more about it?  Nick: This is the ability to essentially stream data from a GoldenGate trail file, and they do a real time analytics on it. And also things like geofencing or real-time series analysis of it.  15:40 Lois: Could you give us an example of this? Nick: If I'm working in tracking stock market information and stocks, it's not really that important on how much or how far down a stock goes. What's really important is how quickly did that stock rise or how quickly did that stock fall. And that's something that GoldenGate Stream Analytics product can do. Another thing that it's very valuable for is the geofencing. I can have an application on my phone and I can track where the user is based on that application and all that information goes into a database. I can then use the geofencing tool to say that, hey, if one of those users on that app gets within a certain distance of one of my brick-and-mortar stores, I can actually send them a push notification to say, hey, come on in and you can order your favorite drink just by clicking Yes, and we'll have it ready for you. And so there's a lot of things that you can do there to help upsell your customers and to get more revenue just through GoldenGate itself. And then we also have a GoldenGate Migration Utility, which allows customers to migrate from the classic architecture into the microservices architecture. 16:44 Nikita: Thanks Nick for that comprehensive overview.  Lois: In our next episode, we’ll have Nick back with us to talk about commonly used terminology and the GoldenGate architecture. And if you want to learn more about what we discussed today, visit mylearn.oracle.com and take a look at the Oracle GoldenGate 23ai Fundamentals course. Until next time, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off! 17:10 That’s all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We’d also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

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  17:39
• What is Oracle GoldenGate 23ai?

  In a new season of the Oracle University Podcast, Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham dive into the world of Oracle GoldenGate 23ai, a cutting-edge software solution for data management. They are joined by Nick Wagner, a seasoned expert in database replication, who provides a comprehensive overview of this powerful tool.   Nick highlights GoldenGate's ability to ensure continuous operations by efficiently moving data between databases and platforms with minimal overhead. He emphasizes its role in enabling real-time analytics, enhancing data security, and reducing costs by offloading data to low-cost hardware. The discussion also covers GoldenGate's role in facilitating data sharing, improving operational efficiency, and reducing downtime during outages.   Oracle GoldenGate 23ai: Fundamentals: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-goldengate-23ai-fundamentals/145884/237273 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. ---------------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started! 00:25 Nikita: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I’m Nikita Abraham, Team Lead: Editorial Services with Oracle University, and with me is Lois Houston: Director of Innovation Programs. Lois: Hi everyone! Welcome to a new season of the podcast. This time, we’re focusing on the fundamentals of Oracle GoldenGate. Oracle GoldenGate helps organizations manage and synchronize their data across diverse systems and databases in real time.  And with the new Oracle GoldenGate 23ai release, we’ll uncover the latest innovations and features that empower businesses to make the most of their data. Nikita: Taking us through this is Nick Wagner, Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle GoldenGate. He’s been doing database replication for about 25 years and has been focused on GoldenGate on and off for about 20 of those years.  01:18 Lois: In today’s episode, we’ll ask Nick to give us a general overview of the product, along with some use cases and benefits. Hi Nick! To start with, why do customers need GoldenGate? Nick: Well, it delivers continuous operations, being able to continuously move data from one database to another database or data platform in efficiently and a high-speed manner, and it does this with very low overhead. Almost all the GoldenGate environments use transaction logs to pull the data out of the system, so we're not creating any additional triggers or very little overhead on that source system. GoldenGate can also enable real-time analytics, being able to pull data from all these different databases and move them into your analytics system in real time can improve the value that those analytics systems provide. Being able to do real-time statistics and analysis of that data within those high-performance custom environments is really important. 02:13 Nikita: Does it offer any benefits in terms of cost?  Nick: GoldenGate can also lower IT costs. A lot of times people run these massive OLTP databases, and they are running reporting in those same systems. With GoldenGate, you can offload some of the data or all the data to a low-cost commodity hardware where you can then run the reports on that other system. So, this way, you can get back that performance on the OLTP system, while at the same time optimizing your reporting environment for those long running reports. You can improve efficiencies and reduce risks. Being able to reduce the amount of downtime during planned and unplanned outages can really make a big benefit to the overall operational efficiencies of your company.  02:54 Nikita: What about when it comes to data sharing and data security? Nick: You can also reduce barriers to data sharing. Being able to pull subsets of data, or just specific pieces of data out of a production database and move it to the team or to the group that needs that information in real time is very important. And it also protects the security of your data by only moving in the information that they need and not the entire database. It also provides extensibility and flexibility, being able to support multiple different replication topologies and architectures. 03:24 Lois: Can you tell us about some of the use cases of GoldenGate? Where does GoldenGate truly shine?  Nick: Some of the more traditional use cases of GoldenGate include use within the multicloud fabric. Within a multicloud fabric, this essentially means that GoldenGate can replicate data between on-premise environments, within cloud environments, or hybrid, cloud to on-premise, on-premise to cloud, or even within multiple clouds. So, you can move data from AWS to Azure to OCI. You can also move between the systems themselves, so you don't have to use the same database in all the different clouds. For example, if you wanted to move data from AWS Postgres into Oracle running in OCI, you can do that using Oracle GoldenGate. We also support maximum availability architectures. And so, there's a lot of different use cases here, but primarily geared around reducing your recovery point objective and recovery time objective. 04:20 Lois: Ah, reducing RPO and RTO. That must have a significant advantage for the customer, right? Nick: So, reducing your RPO and RTO allows you to take advantage of some of the benefits of GoldenGate, being able to do active-active replication, being able to set up GoldenGate for high availability, real-time failover, and it can augment your active Data Guard and Data Guard configuration. So, a lot of times GoldenGate is used within Oracle's maximum availability architecture platinum tier level of replication, which means that at that point you've got lots of different capabilities within the Oracle Database itself. But to help eke out that last little bit of high availability, you want to set up an active-active environment with GoldenGate to really get true zero RPO and RTO. GoldenGate can also be used for data offloading and data hubs. Being able to pull data from one or more source systems and move it into a data hub, or into a data warehouse for your operational reporting. This could also be your analytics environment too. 05:22 Nikita: Does GoldenGate support online migrations? Nick: In fact, a lot of companies actually get started in GoldenGate by doing a migration from one platform to another. Now, these don't even have to be something as complex as going from one database like a DB2 on-premise into an Oracle on OCI, it could even be simple migrations. A lot of times doing something like a major application or a major database version upgrade is going to take downtime on that production system. You can use GoldenGate to eliminate that downtime. So this could be going from Oracle 19c to Oracle 23ai, or going from application version 1.0 to application version 2.0, because GoldenGate can do the transformation between the different application schemas. You can use GoldenGate to migrate your database from on premise into the cloud with no downtime as well. We also support real-time analytic feeds, being able to go from multiple databases, not only those on premise, but being able to pull information from different SaaS applications inside of OCI and move it to your different analytic systems. And then, of course, we also have the ability to stream events and analytics within GoldenGate itself.  06:34 Lois: Let's move on to the various topologies supported by GoldenGate. I know GoldenGate supports many different platforms and can be used with just about any database. Nick: This first layer of topologies is what we usually consider relational database topologies. And so this would be moving data from Oracle to Oracle, Postgres to Oracle, Sybase to SQL Server, a lot of different types of databases. So the first architecture would be unidirectional. This is replicating from one source to one target. You can do this for reporting. If I wanted to offload some reports into another server, I can go ahead and do that using GoldenGate. I can replicate the entire database or just a subset of tables. I can also set up GoldenGate for bidirectional, and this is what I want to set up GoldenGate for something like high availability. So in the event that one of the servers crashes, I can almost immediately reconnect my users to the other system. And that almost immediately depends on the amount of latency that GoldenGate has at that time. So a typical latency is anywhere from 3 to 6 seconds. So after that primary system fails, I can reconnect my users to the other system in 3 to 6 seconds. And I can do that because as GoldenGate’s applying data into that target database, that target system is already open for read and write activity. GoldenGate is just another user connecting in issuing DML operations, and so it makes that failover time very low. 07:59 Nikita: Ok…If you can get it down to 3 to 6 seconds, can you bring it down to zero? Like zero failover time?   Nick: That's the next topology, which is active-active. And in this scenario, all servers are read/write all at the same time and all available for user activity. And you can do multiple topologies with this as well. You can do a mesh architecture, which is where every server talks to every other server. This works really well for 2, 3, 4, maybe even 5 environments, but when you get beyond that, having every server communicate with every other server can get a little complex. And so at that point we start looking at doing what we call a hub and spoke architecture, where we have lots of different spokes. At the end of each spoke is a read/write database, and then those communicate with a hub. So any change that happens on one spoke gets sent into the hub, and then from the hub it gets sent out to all the other spokes. And through that architecture, it allows you to really scale up your environments. We have customers that are doing up to 150 spokes within that hub architecture. Within active-active replication as well, we can do conflict detection and resolution, which means that if two users modify the same row on two different systems, GoldenGate can actually determine that there was an issue with that and determine what user wins or which row change wins, which is extremely important when doing active-active replication. And this means that if one of those systems fails, there is no downtime when you switch your users to another active system because it's already available for activity and ready to go. 09:35 Lois: Wow, that’s fantastic. Ok, tell us more about the topologies. Nick: GoldenGate can do other things like broadcast, sending data from one system to multiple systems, or many to one as far as consolidation. We can also do cascading replication, so when data moves from one environment that GoldenGate is replicating into another environment that GoldenGate is replicating. By default, we ignore all of our own transactions. But there's actually a toggle switch that you can flip that says, hey, GoldenGate, even though you wrote that data into that database, still push it on to the next system. And then of course, we can also do distribution of data, and this is more like moving data from a relational database into something like a Kafka topic or a JMS queue or into some messaging service. 10:24 Raise your game with the Oracle Cloud Applications skills challenge. Get free training on Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications, Oracle Modern Best Practice, and Oracle Cloud Success Navigator. Pass the free Oracle Fusion Cloud Foundations Associate exam to earn a Foundations Associate certification. Plus, there’s a chance to win awards and prizes throughout the challenge! What are you waiting for? Join the challenge today by visiting visit oracle.com/education. 10:58 Nikita: Welcome back! Nick, does GoldenGate also have nonrelational capabilities?  Nick: We have a number of nonrelational replication events in topologies as well. This includes things like data lake ingestion and streaming ingestion, being able to move data and data objects from these different relational database platforms into data lakes and into these streaming systems where you can run analytics on them and run reports. We can also do cloud ingestion, being able to move data from these databases into different cloud environments. And this is not only just moving it into relational databases with those clouds, but also their data lakes and data fabrics. 11:38 Lois: You mentioned a messaging service earlier. Can you tell us more about that? Nick: Messaging replication is also possible. So we can actually capture from things like messaging systems like Kafka Connect and JMS, replicate that into a relational data, or simply stream it into another environment. We also support NoSQL replication, being able to capture from MongoDB and replicate it onto another MongoDB for high availability or disaster recovery, or simply into any other system. 12:06 Nikita: I see. And is there any integration with a customer’s SaaS applications? Nick: GoldenGate also supports a number of different OCI SaaS applications. And so a lot of these different applications like Oracle Financials Fusion, Oracle Transportation Management, they all have GoldenGate built under the covers and can be enabled with a flag that you can actually have that data sent out to your other GoldenGate environment. So you can actually subscribe to changes that are happening in these other systems with very little overhead. And then of course, we have event processing and analytics, and this is the final topology or flexibility within GoldenGate itself. And this is being able to push data through data pipelines, doing data transformations. GoldenGate is not an ETL tool, but it can do row-level transformation and row-level filtering.  12:55 Lois: Are there integrations offered by Oracle GoldenGate in automation and artificial intelligence? Nick: We can do time series analysis and geofencing using the GoldenGate Stream Analytics product. It allows you to actually do real time analysis and time series analysis on data as it flows through the GoldenGate trails. And then that same product, the GoldenGate Stream Analytics, can then take the data and move it to predictive analytics, where you can run MML on it, or ONNX or other Spark-type technologies and do real-time analysis and AI on that information as it's flowing through.  13:29 Nikita: So, GoldenGate is extremely flexible. And given Oracle's focus on integrating AI into its product portfolio, what about GoldenGate? Does it offer any AI-related features, especially since the product name has “23ai” in it? Nick: With the advent of Oracle GoldenGate 23ai, it's one of the two products at this point that has the AI moniker at Oracle. Oracle Database 23ai also has it, and that means that we actually do stuff with AI. So the Oracle GoldenGate product can actually capture vectors from databases like MySQL HeatWave, Postgres using pgvector, which includes things like AlloyDB, Amazon RDS Postgres, Aurora Postgres. We can also replicate data into Elasticsearch and OpenSearch, or if the data is using vectors within OCI or the Oracle Database itself. So GoldenGate can be used for a number of things here. The first one is being able to migrate vectors into the Oracle Database. So if you're using something like Postgres, MySQL, and you want to migrate the vector information into the Oracle Database, you can. Now one thing to keep in mind here is a vector is oftentimes like a GPS coordinate. So if I need to know the GPS coordinates of Austin, Texas, I can put in a latitude and longitude and it will give me the GPS coordinates of a building within that city. But if I also need to know the altitude of that same building, well, that's going to be a different algorithm. And GoldenGate and replicating vectors is the same way. When you create a vector, it's essentially just creating a bunch of numbers under the screen, kind of like those same GPS coordinates. The dimension and the algorithm that you use to generate that vector can be different across different databases, but the actual meaning of that data will change. And so GoldenGate can replicate the vector data as long as the algorithm and the dimensions are the same. If the algorithm and the dimensions are not the same between the source and the target, then you'll actually want GoldenGate to replicate the base data that created that vector. And then once GoldenGate replicates the base data, it'll actually call the vector embedding technology to re-embed that data and produce that numerical formatting for you.  15:42 Lois: So, there are some nuances there… Nick: GoldenGate can also replicate and consolidate vector changes or even do the embedding API calls itself. This is really nice because it means that we can take changes from multiple systems and consolidate them into a single one. We can also do the reverse of that too. A lot of customers are still trying to find out which algorithms work best for them. How many dimensions? What's the optimal use? Well, you can now run those in different servers without impacting your actual AI system. Once you've identified which algorithm and dimension is going to be best for your data, you can then have GoldenGate replicate that into your production system and we'll start using that instead. So it's a nice way to switch algorithms without taking extensive downtime. 16:29 Nikita: What about in multicloud environments?  Nick: GoldenGate can also do multicloud and N-way active-active Oracle replication between vectors. So if there's vectors in Oracle databases, in multiple clouds, or multiple on-premise databases, GoldenGate can synchronize them all up. And of course we can also stream changes from vector information, including text as well into different search engines. And that's where the integration with Elasticsearch and OpenSearch comes in. And then we can use things like NVIDIA and Cohere to actually do the AI on that data.  17:01 Lois: Using GoldenGate with AI in the database unlocks so many possibilities. Thanks for that detailed introduction to Oracle GoldenGate 23ai and its capabilities, Nick.  Nikita: We’ve run out of time for today, but Nick will be back next week to talk about how GoldenGate has evolved over time and its latest features. And if you liked what you heard today, head over to mylearn.oracle.com and take a look at the Oracle GoldenGate 23ai Fundamentals course to learn more. Until next time, this is Nikita Abraham… Lois: And Lois Houston, signing off! 17:33 That’s all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We’d also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

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