Oracle GoldenGate Reviews

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

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

What needs improvement in Oracle GoldenGate is the support.

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

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

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

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

Oracle GoldenGate is a scalable solution.

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

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

Licensing for Oracle GoldenGate is paid yearly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oracle GoldenGate can be deployed on-premise and in the cloud.

We have some critical Oracle databases. Most of our marketing business data are in Oracle databases, we wanted to replicate this data to the downstream application. As part of that, we are using Oracle GoldenGate.

Many of the features of Oracle GoldenGate are valuable. We use Oracle databases and this tool is from Oracle, making it have superior compatibility.

I have been using Oracle GoldenGate for approximately three years.

We have not faced any issues with Oracle GoldenGate, it is stable.

Oracle GoldenGate is scalable. It is an approximate tool for large databases.

The technical support from Oracle has been responsive, they are good.

We have used many other tools in parallel with Oracle GoldenGate, such as Qlik Attunity for the replication.

Oracle GoldenGate's installation is not user-friendly, we had to read a lot of documentation for the setup and configuration.

The implementation of the solution took approximately a few hours and if there are any issues it can take longer. 

We did the implementation in-house. We have a team of 20 that handles the duplication. They handle various tools including Oracle GoldenGate.

We have purchased corporate licensing to use Oracle GoldenGate.

My advice to others is Oracle GoldenGate has a lot of built-in features, it takes time to set up and configure but the performance is very good compared to other tools in the market.

I rate Oracle GoldenGate a seven out of ten.

It supports data movement for heterogeneous platforms as well as homogeneous platforms. We are using it for both use cases. Some use cases are for secondary sites, and some use cases are for different applications, such as data warehousing. We are using its latest version.

It moves the data as you set it up, and it works. I am also very impressed with its stability and scalability.

It is not super feature-rich, but the new releases have more functionality. It recently had more native integrations with Oracle Database. If you are using it against an Oracle database, it has a lot more functionality.

Troubleshooting issues is not always the easiest (can't always find info on errors online or at MyOracleSupport).  Oracle's professional support can also be improved (take a long time to resond to ticket, when they do it is obvious they don't read the issue before responding; they frequently ask for info already provided in the ticket.)

GoldenGate for big data is a separately licensed product. Regarding big data, I've found multiple prop file parameters not documented, not in the sample programs, yet were required. 

We have been using it in our organization for seven to ten years.

It is pretty stable. 

It is a truly scalable product. We have a team of two to run it, and they're part of the infrastructure team. There are lots of people who use the backend data. Their roles could be from business reporting to data scientists.

We have plans to increase its usage. We're finding more use cases for it all the time.

Oracle support is very frustrating in terms of how they pass tickets back and forth and don't read your problem statement. They waste a lot of time getting their support kicked into gear.

It has a medium complexity level.

It was done in-house.

We have an enterprise license for it. It might be for three years or so. I'm not aware of any additional costs to the standard licensing fee.

It works great as a text-based application. There are a lot of hooplas you have to run through for more of a GUI support. It requires a high level of knowledge to get started.

I would definitely recommend starting out with very simple extracts, pumps, and replicates to get the environment working and then jump in with specific tables that you need.

I would rate Oracle GoldenGate a six 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. 

The areas we use for this product for is centralizing the collection of hospital data. In Saudi Arabia there are five special hospitals and each branch there is a local facility for data entry. Users enter data in the local database in their branches and the data is collected in a centralized database that is also in Saudi Arabia. These tools use criteria to identify cases that are similar in different hospital branches to help in diagnosis and treatment.

I am working on this project to serve as the administrator for the database. Before this, I joined a lot of projects, sometimes part-time, in Cairo and I gained 18 years of experience working on databases in the maritime ports in Arab countries and in hospitals in Arab countries, in Cairo, in Egypt, in Iraq, in parts of Spain and around the Arabian Sea. My primary responsibility is to make centralized data available.

I signed with Oracle to use GoldenGate for this project five months ago. I needed two or three months just to explore GoldenGate to get to know it and the features. There are many awesome features in GoldenGate and from what I see in the case studies, I need some more months of discovery to know what I think are the most valuable features. If you call me a month from now, I will be able to answer the question as to which of the excellent features are the most valuable. Right now it would be that I have confidence that GoldenGate can handle this extensive project.

I use an on-premises installation of GoldenGate — a standard GoldenGate installation — to do our test deployment for our projects. Part of the Oracle solution that needs some improvement is the ability to test features extensively before purchase and deployment. I am from Egypt and the economy is not so good. To create proper test environments for complex enterprise deployments is very expensive. Right now there is no place in Egypt that has enough servers to provide a proper test environment for a large deployment like the one we have planned. I do my best to do the test here with what I have.

It is a poor model to test all the GoldenGate features in an improper environment because a valid test of the features of GoldenGate may require a huge investment in accessories like memory and processors. I still need to do the testing. I need to write the code to test out the deployment without a proper environment and without using some features that may be valuable in achieving our goals. I am going to join a project to perform testing with Oracle Exadata in hopes to have free equipment to test this with. In this way, I hope to have a good enough environment to test the product. The project will be huge will be much larger in the future.

It could be that I will find I need to test out the cloud as a potential solution. I think I need one month or two months to decide what is the solution. But assistance from Oracle in temporary testing facilities would be useful and create the opportunity for investment.

I have a lot of experience with Oracle technical support. The technical support in Egypt is not responsive. When I have encountered issues they waste time in gathering unnecessary information. They send me a program, to export some files so they can look into the problem. This is a big waste of time and an unnecessary delay.

One or two days they are saying they are working on this case. While they are doing this I do my best to solve the problem on my own and search the Oracle Mechanic and Google. I raise the severity to the top, and nothing happens faster. The user suffers the consequence of inefficient support. I spent money on support and on my own I find out this issue is already a known issue and I apply the solution myself before they get back to me. They have the price I paid for support, and I provide my own solutions.

I think that the installation of this product is very straightforward. I am sure I will encounter some problems and other issues because I installed a sample configuration of GoldenGate. This is a sample project where I have installed a huge database. It gives me the opportunity to encounter some problems and issues. I hope that I do not see any problems, but I am pretty sure I will experience some things that will go wrong.

The installation of Oracle's GoldenGate is fairly different from other similar applications. It is straightforward but at the same time more difficult. I think that is partly because other solutions will have about one-quarter of the features when compared to GoldenGate.

I have completed the installations myself.

The pricing is done on a yearly basis. They have additional packages for technical support.

I have had the opportunity to use many products working for 18 years with databases. The list would be long if I tried to name the other products that I worked with. For this project, I suggested directly going to use Oracle products to create a solution because my experience says that it is the best way to do it. With some solutions, it would only be possible to join two modems at the maximum. We needed something more robust and to me, it was obvious that out of everything Oracle was the best.

My opinion of GoldenGate is that it is an improvement over earlier Oracle products. I think that the interface for GoldenGate is very user-friendly. I recommend that people support the use of Oracle GoldenGate and have made this opinion known to colleagues in Egypt who are responsible for team projects.

On a scale from one to ten — one being the worst and ten being the best — I would grade  Oracle GoldenGate as a nine right now. After one or two more months working with the product, maybe the nine would be ten. It could be ten right now because I haven't faced any problems. This tool and Oracle's reputation speak for themselves. I don't need to complicate the issues by involving and a big problem I had in the past. But if I need a real reason why it should not be a ten and a nine is justified, I need Oracle to improve its support in Egypt. This is a genuine issue that is ongoing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oracle GoldenGate's cost is high. 

I rate the tool an eight out of ten. 

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using Oracle GoldenGate for almost four years.

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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