With an impressive 25-year experience with Oracle, Quest Software continues to innovate Postgres-based solutions, growing their ecosystem to address a wide variety of contemporary use cases.
Experts from Quest joined DBTA’s webinar, From Oracle to Postgres: Some Modern Database Architectures & Seamless Transitions, to discuss the latest of Quest’s Postgres-based offerings finding considerable success in a post-Oracle world.
Michael O’Donnell, senior analyst at Quest Software, explained to webinar viewers that the shift from Oracle to Postgres, for many organizations, is happening.
“We wouldn’t be investing in Postgres if we didn’t see the need that our customers are telling us about,” he explained.
Richard Schiller, senior product manager at Quest Software, continued the conversation by narrowing the topic down to replication for availability.
While replication has been in the market for a long time, there has been a growing need for the technology as it has become intrinsically tied to keeping databases available.
Oliver Reitmeier, presales systems consultant at Quest Software, explained that SharePlex by Quest became necessary when long distance failovers rose in frequency. Despite the long distance, SLAs required failover to take mere seconds.
SharePlex was able to accomplish this because it did not rely on Oracle services or hardware services; it relied on its connection between source and target.
Migration between systems can pose downtime risks that threaten availability, however. Unplanned or unintended downtime in the migration from Oracle to Postgres, as Schiller explained, can be the thing that “causes cold sweats for DBAs.”
Reitmeier explained that customers can use SharePlex to test the migration to a new platform without any downtime to the service. SharePlex de-risks migrations, providing a fallback path when issues present themselves, with no loss of data while keeping data in sync.
Active-active replication, or two writable instances that are staying in sync, is the next level of availability above single replication.
Mark Gowdy, director of sales engineering at Quest Software, explained that a specific customer who needed bi-directional replication was looking to create an entirely new application stack, all while upgrading their Oracle database without losing a single transaction.
A few problems occur in this scenario, Gowdy explained. These include:
- Ensuring two active data centers—one on-prem and one in the cloud—remain in sync
- Migrating customer traffic to the cloud takes downtime
- If things go wrong, you need a way to rollback
To manage these moving pieces, SharePlex’s bi-directional replication with conflict resolution and load balancer capabilities enabled the two data centers to remain synchronized as the upgrades were occurring, while traffic could be split and changed between each of the data centers. This also allowed the possibility for rollback with zero downtime.
SharePlex is only one of Quest’s numerous offerings; other proven and award-winning products include erwin by Quest, Foglight by Quest, and Toad by Quest. These solutions address modeling environments, cross-platform monitoring, multi-cloud, multi-platform, cross-region HA/DR, and more.
For an in-depth discussion of Quest products for Oracle to Postgres migration, featuring customer use cases, a Q&A, and more, you can view an archived version of the webinar here.