Oracle GoldenGate 11g

Goldengate can work for moving data between heterogeneous hardware and different database versions.

You need to be aware of GG's limitation that some column types cannot be replicated. A quick query against the V$ views can provide the answer.

In addition, GG and other log based mining tools require that the DB tables have supplemental logging turned on which can influence the size and amount of redo/archive logs generated. this  more of an operational issue but needs to be considered if the migration process is taking time.

There are several schools of thought but ultimately you need to consider the amount of data that needs to be moved, the the rate of changes that the tables experience, outage window the customer has and the hardware you working with.

I often used several solutions for the same DB depending on the type of activity the tables were experiencing.

All,

Already replied this to Travers by mail, but here my reply so everybody can enjoy and comment:

Hi Travers,

The short answer is yes, Golden Gate can do that (at least this is what I understand from Oracle documentation etc, have no hands-on experience myself). It works by monitoring the redo logs for certain transactions and then converts the redo log format back into SQL and applies that on the target (and vice versa). If you have stuff not going through redo logs, it will not be replicated by GG (so probably ACFS files are out of scope and a lot of other stuff as well).

But a few things to consider:

GG is EXTREMELY expensive (after Oracle acquired the company, that is )

I know one customer who needs it to migrate 9i on SPARC to 11g on Linux. Oracle charges them 500K $ per server without maintenance & support. So that's more than 1 million US$ excluding support, consulting and implementation... so be warned..

You might want to look at much cheaper alternatives that can do the same. Informatica has acquired Wysdomforce and is supposed to have similar features but probably at 10% of the cost. Same for Quest Shareplex. If you need contacts then I can help, I have connections with the EMEA guys from Informatica.

GG is not a D/R platform. It bi-directionally synchronizes tables between databases and for DR you would need each and every table to be synced (and then you miss DDL statements, triggers, PL/SQL, etc etc etc). GG is a data distribution mechanism. For D/R Oracle promotes Data Guard (which has its own limitations and drawbacks)...

Regards

Bart

Bart et al,

Last year, we engaged Quest (Shareplex) for a customer that was doing the same migration as noted in this post.  Shareplex (if i remember correctly) was about 60% the cost of Golden Gate. So a sizable cost reduction from Quest.

And, Shareplex is a tier-1 software product from Quest not a tier-2 software product like Golden Gate is to Oracle. What this translated in to was Quest has many folks in their Consulting org that can help the customer with implementation services.

The customer we were working withe struggled with finding really knowledgeable people on GG from ORacle.

Hi Matt,

Good to hear!

Must say that I expected Quest to be cheaper as GG seems to be extremely expensive. 60% of a real expensive product still seems a bit high priced to me. But maybe Oracle offered lower pricing at your customer?

If I remember correctly, GG cost our cutomer around $500k, so getting $200k savings was pretty sizable.

Last I heard, the customer and Quest were looking at leasing the software for 6 months to help with the migration anf paying for some consulting which was also an attractive option to our customer.

Oracle would not lease the product for 6 months. Only an outright purchase is available.

Sent from my blackberry... Please excuse typo's or brief reply since I am all thumbs.