For those of you who missed Oracle GoldenGate 11g Release 2 launch webcasts last week, the replay is now available from the following url.

Harnessing the Power of the New Release of Oracle GoldenGate 11g

I would highly recommend watching the webcast to meet many new features of the new release and hear the product management team respond to the questions from the audience in a nice long Q&A section.

In my blog last week I listed the media coverage for this new release. There is a new article published by ITJungle talking about Oracle GoldenGate’s heterogeneity and support for DB2 for iSeries: Oracle Completes DB2/400 Support in Data Replication Tool

As mentioned in last week’s blog, we received over 150 questions from the audience and in this blog I'd like to continue to post some of the frequently asked,  questions and their answers:

Question: What are the fundamental differences between classic data capture and integrated data capture? Do both use the redo logs in the source database?

Answer: Yes, they both use redo logs. Classic capture parses the redo log data directly, whereas the Integrated Capture lets the Oracle database parse the redo log record using an internal API.

Question: Does GoldenGate version need to match Oracle Database version?

Answer: No, they are not directly linked. Oracle GoldenGate 11g Release 2 supports Oracle Database version 10gR2 as well. For Oracle Database version 10gR1 and Oracle Database version 9i you will need GoldenGate11g Release 1 or lower. And for Oracle Database 8i you need Oracle GoldenGate 10 or earlier versions.

Question: If I already use Data Guard, do I need GoldenGate?

Answer: Data Guard is designed as the best disaster recovery solution for Oracle Database. If you would like to implement a bidirectional Active-Active replication solution or need to move data between heterogeneous systems, you will need GoldenGate.

Question: On Compression and GoldenGate, if the source uses compression, is it required that the target also use compression?

Answer: No, the source and target do not need to have the same compression settings.

Question: Does GG support Advance Security Option on the Source database?

Answer: Yes it does.

Question: Can I use GoldenGate to upgrade the Oracle Database to 11g and do OS migration at the same time?

Answer: Yes, this is a very common project where GoldenGate can eliminate downtime, give flexibility to test the target as needed, and minimize risks with fail-back option to the old environment. For more information on database upgrades please check out the following white papers:

Best Practices for Migrating/Upgrading Oracle Database Using Oracle GoldenGate 11g

Zero-Downtime Database Upgrades Using Oracle GoldenGate

Question: Does GoldenGate create any trigger in the source database table level or row level to for real-time data integration?

Answer: No, GoldenGate does not create triggers.

Question: Can transformation be done after insert to destination table or need to be done before?

Answer: It can happen in the Capture (Extract) process, in the  Delivery (Replicat) process, or in the target database.

For more resources on Oracle GoldenGate 11gR2 please check out our Oracle GoldenGate 11gR2 resource kit as well.