Oracle Goldengate Migration; Migrate data with Zero Downtime

In today’s fast-growing world, users are increasingly demanding the ability to use programmes without interruption. Hence, it is a no-brainer that the technology apps need to be available continuously or nearly continuously. On the other hand, the databases have to be upgraded at the same time to overcome the significant bugs, overcome anxiety surrounding the end of the Oracle support, enhance database performance, and obtain new functionality.

For Oracle installations, running critical systems and core business applications, the requirement to continue processing transactions while carrying out significant work on the production database server is becoming a necessity.

However, this presents a problem as the customers cannot afford to stop the business from operating. To address this issue, Oracle has developed a great solution known as Goldengate that uses replication technology for “Zero downtime database upgrade/migration”. Oracle GoldenGate enables the migration of oracle databases and non-oracle databases with almost no downtime and fallback functionality. With its ability to provide zero downtime migration, Oracle GoldenGate plays a significant role in the technology industry. Let’s learn more about it.

Why use Oracle GoldenGate for zero downtime migration?

Migration with near zero downtime has extremely little or no application downtime during the switchover. Oracle GoldenGate is a strong, adaptable, and resumable migration method that is also simple to roll back. The Zero Downtime Migration solution offers several other advantages, as follows:

• Zero Downtime Migration is very configurable and supports different migration methods.
• It allows you to take immediate action to address the issues in real-time.
• Golgengate allows replicating sub-set of data.
• Transformations/ETL can be implemented for scenarios where source and target tables are different.
• The ability to pause and resume your migration project is important for a variety of reasons, including adhering to maintenance windows.
• With Oracle GoldenGate, you can have a fallback plan to avoid business impact and risk during migration. It ensures the source and target is always in sync during migration. You can easily restart your migration job from a failure point.
• To avoid problems during database migration, migration jobs can execute pre-checks.

How does Zero Downtime happen?

Through the use of replication tools like Oracle active data guard, zero downtime migration provides a quick and simple way to transfer on-premises databases and Oracle cloud infrastructure classic instances to Oracle cloud infrastructure, Exadata cloud at customer, and Exadata cloud service, without experiencing any appreciable downtime.

The methods used in zero downtime migration include backing up the source database to Oracle cloud infrastructure object storage, creating a standby database in the target environment from the backup using data guard configuration, Oracle Data guard maximum performance protection mode, and asynchronous (ASYNC) redo transport mode, synchronising the source and target databases, and then switching to the target database as the primary database. After the database migration is finished, zero downtime migration enables and permits fallback functionality.

Additionally, offline (backup and recovery) migration is supported by zero downtime migration. In this method, the source database is backed up to Oracle cloud infrastructure object storage. A new database is created and instantiated to Oracle cloud infrastructure, Exadata cloud at customer, and Exadata cloud service from this object storage backup. There is no requirement for SQL*Net communication between the source and target database servers for this migration.

Conclusion

If you know the migration process, even to a limited extent, you would be aware of the stress and risks involved in each migration procedure. Upgrading or migrating a database with zero downtime is one of those tasks that have proven to be tricky.

It is very important to have experts onboard to perform a task as important and crucial as database migration. To resolve these difficulties, you can take help from our team of technical experts at Princeton IT Services. Contact us to know more.