Oracle GoldenGate free was announced in the last days, with this release, Oracle aims to modernize the way that you deploy and use GoldenGate with the use of a Container environment, in this post I will guide in how to create your first replication using GoldenGate free.
We have a nice tutorial in how to deploy GoldenGate free using OCI Container Instances here if you want to know how to deploy your first instance.
If you are used to work with GoldenGate Microservices, you will see a lot of similarities in these processes and a ton of improvements, for example, the GoldenGate free can even run a Datapump job to do an initial Load.
GoldenGate free supports Oracle Database 11.2.0.4, 12.1.0.2, 19c and 21c with a 20GB maximum size, and your database needs to be running in Archivelog Mode before you create the connection.
After logging into GoldenGate Free, in the home screen, click in “Create Connection” button, give this connection a name and in the second screen we start to see some differences, we have to specify if this connection points to a source or a target(we can't use one connection for everything), CDB and PDB information, the nice thing here is to use the option “SYSDBA privileges available”, with this, the process of configuration will be easier because GoldenGate can connect to source and target to configure everything to you, including adding user and changing database parameters, but you can validate and run commands by hand if you need.