Oracle is strengthening data integration offerings with Oracle Data Integrator 12c and Oracle GoldenGate 12c, major releases of both products. The products add features to improve performance, increase productivity, and simplify deployment, while providing organizations with solutions that address new trends, like cloud computing, big data analytics, and real-time replication.
The Oracle Data Integrator release is the biggest that Oracle has done, and the GoldenGate 12c release, which is also significant, follows on the heels of last year’s 11.2 release which itself was “an enormous release,” Brad Adelberg, vice president of development, Oracle, said in an interview. Tight integration between Oracle Data Integrator 12c and Oracle GoldenGate 12c enables developers to leverage Oracle GoldenGate’s low overhead, real-time change data capture completely within the Oracle Data Integrator Studio without additional training. “We are really accelerating the pace of development in both of these products because they are so strategically critical to Oracle,” Adelberg said.
Commenting on the timing of the two releases, Adelberg noted, “Since GoldenGate has become the strategic logical replication technology for Oracle Database customers, we really are trying to bring out GoldenGate as close to possible after a major new database release (Oracle Database 12c) - and because we have spent a lot more effort integrating our data integration products - in particular our Oracle Data Integrator and GoldenGate - it made sense to bring that out at the same time as well. One of the major features with this release of Oracle Data Integrator is much deeper integration with GoldenGate.”
New Features in Oracle Data Integrator 12c
Oracle Data Integrator is a comprehensive data integration platform that covers all data integration requirements from high-volume, high-performance bulk loads to SOA-enabled data services.
There are three main new features in Oracle Data Integrator 12c, said Adelberg. They include improvements to developer productivity and on-ramping through new declarative flow-based mapping; extreme performance through parallelism and low session overhead; and support for loading and transforming big and fast data, enabled by integration to big data technologies such as Hadoop, Hive, HDFS, and the Oracle Big Data Appliance.
The declarative flow-based mapping is an important addition in this release, explained Adelberg. Oracle Data Integrator has always had a declarative model of ETL development, which provides a number of benefits. It requires far less development effort to design mappings and offers a much higher level of abstraction for doing that development than the traditional flow-based models, he noted. The benefit that people have found with the traditional flow-based approach is that it is a very flexible model for developers to define any kind of mapping that they want. The down side is that it is a lot of tedious work to configure and, if something changes down the road, it requires a lot of changes to the mapping, he noted.
“What we have done with Oracle Data Integrator 12c is combined the best of both into a single model for doing mapping,” said Adelberg. The declarative flow-based mapping provides the flexibility of the flow-based approach but still provides the benefits of the declarative approach in terms of being extremely efficient to develop, and being very robust over time.
New Features in Oracle GoldenGate 12c
In Oracle GoldenGate, which provides real-time data integration and replication in heterogeneous IT environments, there are two main new features said Adelberg.
One is integration with the Oracle Database 12c. “GoldenGate 12c fully supports the multi-tenant features of Oracle Database 12c. You can do your capture at the container level and not have to do it at the individual pluggable database level, which is dramatically more efficient. There is also support for the new data types that come in Oracle Database 12c,” said Adelberg.
The second major new feature in GoldenGate 12c is called Integrated Delivery. “In 11.2 of GoldenGate, we introduced something called Integrated Capture, which was GoldenGate technology being added directly to the database to allow us to efficiently capture changes that were occurring when Oracle was the source of replication,” said Adleberg. “With 12c, we have added similar embedded GoldenGate technology in the database for when Oracle is the target of the replication. This allows us to get dramatically higher throughput when we are delivering changes into Oracle but at the same time significantly simplify the configuration of the product.”
With GoldenGate 12c, said Adelberg, Oracle “is leveraging all of the Redo Apply capabilities that are already part of the database and using that to apply changes for replication instead of having to go in through the SQL layer as we have traditionally had to do.” In addition, he said, the engine knows how to automatically parallelize all of the changes that are being applied. “From a customer perspective, there is virtually nothing to configure and all of the optimization to be able to apply those changes as quickly in parallel as possible, while at the same time respecting the dependency that it needs to, is just built in,” he noted. Integrated Delivery is aware of all dependencies – primary key dependencies, foreign key dependencies, dependencies that arise from uniqueness constraints - and it parallelizes the stream as much as it can with out violating any of those dependencies.
Oracle GoldenGate 12c Expands Support for Database Heterogeneity
GoldenGate 12c also expands heterogeneity through added support for the latest versions of major databases such as Sybase ASE v 15.7, MySQL NDB Clusters 7.2, and MySQL 5.6., as well as integration with Oracle Coherence. “Between Integrated Capture and Integrated Delivery we are at a point where if Oracle is either the source or target of replication, GoldenGate is really the clear choice, but in many situations in our customer base, Oracle is only one of the two sides of the replication so it is not uncommon to see some of the other databases being used in smaller transactional systems feeding an Oracle data warehouse, for example, perhaps an Exadata. We also have a number of customers that are using GoldenGate with no Oracle database in the shop – customers that are going from SQL Server to Teradatra, for example - although of course, Oracle on one of the two sides is really more common,” said Adelberg.
The Oracle Data Integrator 12c Data Sheet and Oracle GoldenGate 12c Data Sheet provide more information. Oracle will also host an Oracle Data Integration 12c Webcast on November 12.