Oracle Corporation’ (ORCL) acquisition of Golden Gate Software on July of 2009 was a big step for Oracle in its quest to build a open and heterogeneous product line that will be more appealing to enterprise customers with complex OLTP and data warehouse environments. You can find a detailed presentation of the considerations that were taken into consideration regarding this acquisition here. In the data warehousing space this is a welcome addition to the earlier acquisition of Sunopsis (now Oracle Data Integrator) a Extract-Load-Transform alternative to traditional ETL tools such as Informatica and IBM Information Server (DataStage) that plays nice in heterogeneous database environments and is significantly easier to use, and more stable than the displaced Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB). Key areas where Golden Gate can be of use in a heterogeneous database environment:
- Simplifying disaster recovery by maintaining near-real time copies of transactional databases
- Change Data Capture and extraction and staging for data warehouse environments
- Real-Time operational business intelligence by means of a message queue and a Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) or Business Process Management (BPM) solution
Under the last scenario events can be fed into real time alerts or dashboard Key Performance Indicator’s in real time in addition to triggering additional events when the event is orchestrated via an enterprise bus. Here’s a link to a step by step installation and configuration demo at Oracle Technology Network (OTN). Stay tunned for additional product reviews and OBIEE tips and tricks that are coming soon and check my review of Oracle Data Integrator here..