A Brief Overview of Oracle GoldenGate Architecture: Part 1

Oracle GoldenGate has made possible data sharing and manipulation between many, heterogeneous platforms, seamlessly. Selected data, transactional changes, and DDL modifications can all be replicated using the Oracle GoldenGate Architecture. It also covers a variety of business needs, high availability and database migration.

A usual Oracle GoldenGate architecture flow depicts fresh and modified data acquired from the source database. Let’s take a look at the components that make up Oracle GoldenGate architecture:

Extract

In GoldenGate, the capture or extraction mechanism of Oracle GoldenGate stands for the Extract process.

Depending on the implementation needs and the database, the extract may operate on a source system, a downstream database, or both. Even though the same transaction may also contain operations on items that are in the Extract configuration, Extract ignores operations on objects that are not in the Extract format or configuration.

One important thing to note is that various Extract processes may work together at the same time on various things. In order to differentiate among different Extract processes, you assign each one a group name.

Remote Trail

The remote trail is like the source trail, with one difference being that it is created on the remote server, which could be the target database or other middle-tier server. Both the source trails and the remote trails are by default kept in the file system directory.

Checkpoints, which are kept in distinct GoldenGate files or optionally in a database table, are used by the GoldenGate processes to keep track of their location in the distant trail files.

Data Pump

A data pump is a secondary Extract batch within the source Oracle GoldenGate setup. The extract must send the captured data operations to a remote trail on the target if you don’t use a data pump.

Generally, in a normal data pump setup, the primary Extract group writes to a trail on the source system. The data pump then reads this trail and directs the data operations over the network to a remote trail on the target.

One of the important functions of the data pump is to add storage flexibility. Moreover, it serves to isolate the primary Extract process from TCP/IP activity and can perform data filtering, mapping, and conversion. You can also configure the data pump in pass-through mode, to transfer data passively transferred with no manipulation involved.

So far, you get to know about Extract, Remote Trail and Data Pump as the critical components of the Oracle GoldenGate architecture. These are followed by Checkpoint, Delivery and Manager components that together complete the Oracle GoldenGate Architecture. To understand the rest of the components, check out Part 2 of this article here. If you need any help related to Oracle GoldenGate, feel free to get in touch with our technology experts at Princeton IT Services.