The Amazing Things You Can Do with OCI GoldenGate in a Multicloud Architecture

Unlocking Multicloud Agility with OCI GoldenGate

In today’s digital landscape, organizations frequently work with multiple cloud service providers (CSPs) to take advantage of the best features and capabilities of each platform. This multicloud approach allows businesses to distribute workloads efficiently, reduce dependency on a single provider, optimize costs, and avoid vendor lock-in. In this blog, we explore how OCI GoldenGate, a fully managed iPaaS service, can play a crucial role in multicloud data replication for high availability and data integration.

Oracle’s Two-Pronged Multicloud Strategy

Before diving into this further, let’s first examine Oracle’s strategic approach to multicloud.

The first pillar of Oracle’s multicloud strategy focuses on interconnect partnerships with leading cloud providers. These high-performance, low-latency connections (such OCI Interconnect for Azure and Google) allow enterprises to integrate Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) with other cloud services. This enables businesses to mix and match best-of-breed solutions—combining OCI’s strengths with specialized offerings from AWS, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure.

The second pillar centers on Oracle Database@Cloud, which brings Autonomous Database and Exadata services natively and soon OCI GoldenGate to other cloud platforms. Enterprises can now deploy fully managed Oracle Databases directly within AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

OCI GoldenGate is available in both deployment models, addressing an abundance of use cases.

High Availability across OCI Regions with OCI GoldenGate

OCI GoldenGate’s signature capability is to detect real-time database changes from within the database kernel. This unique microsecond zero-data-loss capability replicates changes for multiple purposes including high availability within and across OCI regions. OCI GoldenGate is a useful component for enabling high availability and disaster recovery strategies whether service disruptions originated in your applications or cloud provider. OCI GoldenGate can improve your service level commitments (SLA) for recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO).

Database Migration/Upgrade from on-prem or other Cloud Service Providers to OCI

It’s more common than you might think. Oracle, non-Oracle databases and 3rd party data stores are upgraded to the latest versions and databases are re-platformed into, within and across clouds all the time – for dev, test, and production purposes and environments.

OCI GoldenGate performs three essential migration capabilities. First, it captures the source data logically. Second, these logical records are then directed to a target data store. It can be an Oracle Database or any supported data store. This capability allows the target data store to be a newer version, entirely different data store, or re-platformed to a different cloud provider. Third, since the data capture and apply are done asynchronously, the migration can happen when the applications are online or offline. This option becomes the only strategy for long-running migrations for mission critical applications.

A key business migration strategy decision is whether applications must remain online during the migration. A key technical migration strategy decision is how long a large data set takes to move. Both of these scenarios are the right reasons to use OCI GoldenGate and/or OCI Database Migration service for a database migration.

For example, you can migrate from Amazon RDS or Azure SQL Database to OCI Heatwave MySQL, or OCI PostgreSQL, migrating across versions, products, services, and platforms – with minimal effort.

Also, with OCI GoldenGate, a common migration path is from on premises into the cloud. For example, you can upgrade from a self-managed Oracle Database 19c system to the latest Exadata Cloud Service (ExaCS) running Oracle Database 23ai – both an upgrade and a migration.

Hybrid Strategy for Real-Time OCI Data Warehousing & Analytics

A hybrid cloud combines private resources (such as an on-premises data center) with public cloud services like Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Many organizations operate transactional workloads on-premises or in private clouds while leveraging OCI for advanced analytics and data warehousing solutions such as Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW) and Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC).

Using OCI GoldenGate is the most efficient strategy to capture continuous real-time data and move it into OCI data warehouses, data lakes, and data lakehouses. Most importantly, it does not disrupt the performance of source operational systems. If faster data access, more responsive and trusted analytics, and real-time GenAI experiences are your goals, then OCI GoldenGate is the answer.

It is easy to contrast this approach with conventional (batch/bulk, scheduled/pull-based) extract, transformation, and load (ETL) techniques that place heavy demands on operational systems due to excessive queries. In fact, many organizations only schedule ETL jobs after business hours. But such batch windows are shrinking, if not completely disappearing, with today’s 24×7 business requirements.

Hybrid and Cloud Data Warehouses, Data Lakes and Data Lakehouses

Cloud platforms have become the popular targets for data stores supporting analytics and building data products. Cloud data stores span a variety of options, from simple object stores, such as AWS S3, OCI Object Store, to multicloud 3rd party data platforms, such as Databricks, and Snowflake, and solutions exclusive to a provider, such as the Microsoft Data Fabric and Azure Synapse. The list of targets is extensive.

With OCI GoldenGate and GoldenGate, real-time data captures can originate from on premises or any cloud and can be replicated into nearly any data store efficiently with minimal latency. See these links for specific connections and certifications. New connections are announced all the time.

Data Mesh for Microservices and Data Lakes for Big Data Analytics

GoldenGate’s distributed architecture enables domain-oriented cross-functional teams to build data-sharing APIs via OCI GoldenGate Microservices. This approach allows business domain teams to self-service their data while providing real-time consistency between microservices across databases (e.g. MySQL → PostgreSQL or Oracle → PostgreSQL).

OCI GoldenGate also facilitates high volume transactional data ingestion into low-cost cloud-based data lakes, such as OCI Object Storage, Amazon S3 and Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) for big data analytics.

Event-Driven (Pub/Sub) Architectures with OCI GoldenGate

OCI GoldenGate publishes reliable database and messaging change events into most leading event brokers including Kafka, Solace, AWS Kineses, Google Pub/Sub, Azure Event Hub, and OCI Streaming. With OCI GoldenGate as a source, event messaging adds a unique layer of reliability through fault tolerance and event sequencing in your event-driven architecture.

Key OCI GoldenGate processes for event-driven architectures:

Captures database events from source Oracle and non-Oracle databases – MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, and more.
Creates a resilient and replayable trail file of change events for distribution
Enables direct trail file access using Data Streams APIs – a developer API access point
Publishes events directly to message brokers – Kafka, OCI Streaming, Azure Event Hub or Amazon Kinesis, Google Pub/Sub, and more
Enables downstream consumers – Apache Spark, AWS Flink, and more.

Real-Time Insights with OCI GoldenGate Stream Analytics

OCI GoldenGate doesn’t just continuously move data, it also provides sophisticated in-motion analytics.

By leveraging real-time data processing, organizations can enhance operational efficiency, mitigate risks, and drive innovation. Whether it’s financial transactions, IoT sensor data, or customer interactions, OCI GoldenGate Stream Analytics allows enterprises to detect and predict changes so that GenAI experiences are relevant, analytics are timely, enabling the decision makers or other systems to responds immediately.

With OCI GoldenGate Stream Analytics, businesses can unlock powerful capabilities such as:

Anomaly Detection – Identify fraud, detect IoT failures, and uncover irregular patterns before they impact business operations.
Time-Series Forecasting – Predict demand spikes, optimize resource allocation, and anticipate market trends with real-time insights.
Geospatial Tracking – Monitor fleet movements, track assets, and enhance logistics efficiency using location-based analytics.

Conclusion

In today’s highly digitized world, organizations need to exchange data fast – for applications, analytics, and GenAI. OCI GoldenGate is the answer for agile, data-driven operations with reliability and efficiency.

In this blog, we discussed how OCI GoldenGate provides an unmatched enterprise-class solution for real-time data replication for three mission critical operational and analytical/AI use cases: high availability, management, data integration, data analytics/AI. We drilled into HA and DR, database upgrades and migrations, event-driven pub/sub architectures, hybrid and cloud data warehouses/data lakes, and data-in-motion analytics. Believe or not, there’s even more to talk about!

The good news is that you can try it today for free! Visit GoldenGate Free for free downloads.