GoldenGate: A Bridge Over Troubled Water

By Phil Howard, Bloor Research
May 14, 2003

Article URL: http://www.it-director.com/article.php?articleid=10833

GoldenGate is not especially well known in either the UK or Europe, despite having both the Alliance and Leicester, and the LINK ATM network as major UK-based accounts, and approaching 30 customers in Europe as a whole. In the United States the company has lots of well-known users, particularly in the banking, financial services and healthcare sectors.

GoldenGate is in the business of what it calls "the in-synch enterprise", by which it means the synchronisation of data across the organisation. What does this mean? Well, it's not easy to categorise GoldenGate because, as far as I know, there is no other company (or product) quite like it.

In essence, GoldenGate encompasses a three-fold strategy: firstly, that all data should be visible, secondly that all data should be capable of being easily moved from one place to another and, thirdly, that this data should be managed at all times. To say this sounds easy but to accomplish it is no simple task.

In practice, GoldenGate combines replication and recovery capability plus ETL (extract, transform and load) functionality within a context that is essentially one of distributed operations management (that is, a centralised web-based console organises and reports on operations through the use of agents and managers running on distributed platforms). Nor is this all, GoldenGate is change-based, and reads records one at a time from the database transaction log. This means that it doesn't have the performance consequences associated with trigger-based data movement and it also means that it supports real-time capabilities.

GoldenGate has, in fact, been around for some time, having been formed as long ago as 1995 and it is a profitable, private company with its headquarters across the bay from San Francisco.

Originally, the software was developed to run on the Tandem Non-Stop platform so, as you can imagine, it is highly resilient. Today it supports all the leading operating systems (including Linux) as well as some not so leading platforms. In addition, it runs with all the leading databases plus Teradata, TimesTen (the in-memory database) and MySQL (though, interestingly, not PostgreSQL - GoldenGate claims that it is seeing significant demand for MySQL within its customer base but not for PostgreSQL). VSAM is also supported.

Historically, GoldenGate has penetrated customer accounts by going in to solve a tactical problem and then growing into a strategic solution as the full range of its capabilities has become apparent. However, to some extent that is now changing. In the past the company used to market to system architects and DBAs but it is now focusing on CIOs. The reason for this is that GoldenGate does in one tool what several other tools are required to do now (assuming that all of these processes are automated, which is by no means always the case), and the potential for consolidating on a single tool is attractive to CIOs since it should reduce the total cost of ownership.

The whole area of data integration is pretty messy (troubled water?) and I will be writing a report on this whole space later in the summer. In the meantime, GoldenGate looks to have a solution that is worth investigating.

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