Is GoldenGate the Golden Gate

It sure seems from seeing and hearing about GoldenGate that it is the Cadillac (or Genesis if one is so inclined) of replication engines. It appears to offer anywhere between significantly and dramatically less overhead than many other engines. What remains to be seen as it gets more widely adopted is the features that catapult it to the front of people’s minds when considering how to replicate what and where (how far from the master site). I attended the Pythian/Western Union presentation at Oracle Open World in October, featuring Pythian’s own Shervin Sheidaei and  Western Union’s Ron Mashrouteh. There was a lot of attention and chit-chat about this solution and I for one am looking forward to experiencing it first-hand.

I have experienced a handful of Oracle’s replication solutions as far back as version 5 of the database in the mid to late 1980’s. Will GoldenGate be the golden gate? If one ends up answering in the affirmative to most of the following questions, I think so:

1. Are the mechanisms at the administrator’s disposal for conflict resolution intuitive and repeatable between interventions?
2. Is it easy to administer throughout the complete life cycle of change-capture detection on the source repository to application of data changes on the remote site(s)?
3. Are the performance gains achieved by not relying on the more traditional replication engine’s dependency on the archived redo stream dramatic?
4. Is the price point for the product capable of attracting SMB’s that now implement the existing replication solution (streams) that is off-the-shelf with the Enterprise Edition offering?
5. Can a portion of the product’s day-to-day management tasks be executed by non-technical (and sometimes less costly) personnel?
6. Is Oracle support poised to provide as robust and strategic support to the product, at a level of expertise along the lines of the more traditional solution they have been supporting for many years?

Only time will tell … I for one would look forward to the opportunity to get my hands dirty with this technology and come to grips with some of its challenges. Challenges need not always be fraught with sessions of frustrating crisis intervention. Sometimes, in a roundabout way, these very challenges provide opportunities for seasoned database administration personnel to hone their skills with new products … onward and upwards.