Oracle GoldenGate 23ai: New Features & Product Family
Description
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 exa
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