What's New in OCI

In this episode of the Oracle University Podcast, Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham are joined by Mitchell Flinn, VP of Program Management for the CSS Platform, to explore Oracle Cloud Success Navigator.   This interactive platform is designed to help customers optimize their cloud journey, offering best practices, AI tools, and personalized guidance from implementation to innovation. Don’t miss this insider look at maximizing your Oracle Cloud investment!   Oracle Cloud Success Navigator Essentials: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-cloud-success-navigator-essentials/147489/242186 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started! 00:25 Nikita: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I’m Nikita Abraham, Team Lead of Editorial Services with Oracle University, and joining me is my co-host Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs.  Lois: Hi everyone! Today is the first of a two-part special on Oracle Cloud Success Navigator. This is a tool that provides you with a clear path to cloud transformation and helps you get the most out of your cloud investment. 00:52 Nikita: And to tell us more about this, we have Mitchell Flinn joining us today. Mitchell is VP of Program Management for Oracle Cloud Success Navigator. In this episode, we’ll ask Mitchell about the ins and outs of this powerful platform, its benefits, key features, and the role it plays in streamlining cloud journeys. Lois: Yeah. Hi Mitchell! What is Oracle's approach to cloud technology and customer success, and how does the Cloud Success Navigator support this philosophy? 01:22 Mitchell: Oracle has an amazing amount of industry-leading enterprise cloud technologies across our entire portfolio. All of this is at your disposal. That, coupled with the sole focus of your success, forms the crux of the company's transformational journey. In other words, we put your success at the heart of everything we do. For each organization, the path to achieve maximum value from our technology is unique. Success Navigator reflects our emphasis on being there with you throughout the entire journey to steer you to success.  01:53 Nikita: Ok, what about from a business’s viewpoint? Why would they need the Navigator? Mitchell: Businesses across every industry are moving mission-critical applications to the cloud. However, business leaders understand that there's no one-size-fits-all model for cloud development and deployment. Some fundamentals for success are your need to ensure new technologies are seamlessly integrated into day-to-day operations and continually optimize to align with evolving business requirements. You must ensure stakeholder visibility through the journey with updates at every stage. Building system efficiencies into other key tasks, which has to be done at the forefront when considering your cloud transformation. You also need to quickly identify risks and address them during the implementation process and beyond. Beyond the technical execution, cloud deployments also require significant process and organizational changes to ensure that adoption is aligned with business goals and delivers tangible benefits. Moreover, the training process for new features after cloud adoption can be an organization wide initiative that needs special attention. These requirements or more can be addressed through Oracle Cloud Success Navigator, which is a new interactive digital platform to guide you through all stages of your cloud journey. 03:09 Lois: Mitchell, how does Cloud Success Navigator platform enhance the user experience? How does it support customers at different stages of their cloud journey? Mitchell: Platform is included for free for all cloud application customers. And core to Success Navigator is the goal of increasing transparency among customers, partners in the Oracle team, from project kickoff through quarterly releases. Included in the platform are implementation best practices, Oracle Modern Best Practices focused on solutions provided by our applications, and guidance on living within the cloud.   Success Navigator supports you for every stage of your Oracle journey. You can first get your bearings and understand what's possible with your cloud solution using preconfigured starter environments to support your design decisions. It helps you chart a proven course by providing access to Oracle expertise and Oracle Modern Best Practices, so you can use cloud quality standards to guide your implementation approach. You can find value from quarterly releases using AI assistants and preview environments to experience and adopt latest features that matter to you. And you can blaze new trails by building your own cloud roadmap based on your organization's goals, keeping you focused on the capabilities you need for day-to-day and the road ahead. 04:24 Nikita: How does the Navigator cater to the needs of all the different customers? Mitchell: For customers just getting started with Oracle implementations, Navigator provides a framework with success criteria for each stakeholder involved in the implementation, and provides recommended milestones and checklists to keep everyone on track. For existing customers and experienced cloud customers thriving in the cloud, it provides contextually relevant insights based on your cloud landscape. It prepares you for quarterly releases and preview environments, and enables the use of AI and optimization within your cloud investment. For our partners, it allows Oracle to work in a collaborative way to really team up for our customers. Navigator gives transparency to all stakeholders and helps determine what success criteria we should be thinking about at each milestone phase of the journey. And it also helps customers and partners get more out of their Oracle investment through a seamless process. 05:20 Lois: Right. Mitchell, can you elaborate on the use cases of the platform? How does it address challenges and requirements during cloud implementations? Mitchell: We can create transparency and alignment between you, your partner, and the Oracle team using shared view of progress measured through standard criteria. We can incorporate recommended key milestones and activities to help you visualize and measure your progress. And we can use built-in assessments, remove risk, and ask the right questions at the right time to make the right implementation decisions for your organization. Additionally, we can use Starter Configuration, which allows you to experience the latest capabilities and leading practices to enrich design decisions for your organization with Starter Configuration. This can activate Starter Configuration early in your journey to understand what delivered capability can do for you. It allows you to evaluate modern best practices to determine how your design process can work in the future. And it empowers and educates your organization by interacting with real capability, using real processes to make the right decisions for your cloud implementation. You're able to access new features in Fusion updates. You can do this to learn what you need to know about new features in a one-stop shop and connect your company in a compelling capacity. You can find, familiarize, and prioritize new and existing features in one place. And you can experience new features in hands-on preview environments available with you with each quarterly release. You can explore new theme-based approaches using adoption centers for AI and Redwood to understand where to start and how to get there. And you can understand innovation opportunities based on business processes, data insights, and industry benchmarks. 07:01 Nikita: Now that we’ve covered the basics, can you walk us through some of the key features of the platform? Let’s start with the Home page. Mitchell: This is the starting point of the customer journey and the central location for everything Navigator has to offer, including best practice content. You'll find content focused on implementation phase, the innovation phase, and administrative elements like the team structure, program and projects, and other relevant tips and tricks. Cloud Quality Standards provides learning content and checklists for successful business transformation. This helps support the effective adoption and adherence to Cloud Quality Standards and enables individuals to leverage AI and predictive insights. The feature Sunburst allows capability for features to be reviewed in an interactive graphic, illustrating new features by pillar, other attributes, which enable customers to review features curated to identify and adopt new features that meet their needs. It helps you understand recommended features across your application base based off of a production profile, covering mandatory adoption requirements, efficiency gains, innovation capabilities like AI and Redwood to drive business change. Next is the Adoption Center, which addresses the need of our existing and implementing customers. It covers the concept of how Redwood is an imperative for our application customers, what it means, and how, and when we could translate some of the requirements to a business user or an IT user. Roadmap is an opportunity for the team to evaluate which features are most interesting at any given moment, the items that they would like to adopt next, and save features or items that they might require later. 08:36 Lois: That’s great. Mitchell, I know we have two new features rolling out in 2025. Can you tell us a little bit about them? Mitchell: Preview Environment. This allows users to explore new features and orderly release through a shared environment by logging into Navigator, eliminating potential regression needs, data adjustments and loads, and other common pre-work. You can explore the feature directly with the support of Oracle Guided Learning. The second additional feature for 2025 is AI Assist. We've taken everything within Navigator and trained an LLM to provide customers the ability to inquire about best practices, solutions, and features within the applications and ultimately make them smarter as they prepare for areas like design workshops, quarterly release readiness, and engaging across our overall Oracle team. Customers can use, share, and apply Oracle content knowledge to their day-to-day responsibilities. 09:32 Have you mastered the basics of AI? Are you ready to take your skills to the next level? Unlock the potential of advanced AI with our OCI Generative AI Professional course and certification that covers topics like Large Language Models, the OCI Generative AI Service, and building Q&A chatbots for real-world applications. Head over to mylearn.oracle.com and find out more.  10:01 Nikita: Welcome back! Mitchell, how can I get started with the Navigator? Mitchell: To request customer access to Success Navigator's environment, you need to submit a request form via the Success Navigator page on oracle.com.  You need to be able to provide your customer support identifier with the help icon around the CSI number. If you don't have your CSI number, you can still submit your request and a member of the Success Navigator team will reach out and coordinate with you to understand the information that's required. Once access is granted, you'll receive a welcome email to Oracle Cloud Success Navigator. 10:35 Lois: Alright, and after that’s done? Mitchell: Before implementing Oracle Cloud Applications in your organization, you need to think of a structure that helps you organize and manage that implementation. To implement a solution footprint for a relatively small organization operating in a single country, and with an implementation time of only a few months, defining a single project might be a good enough organization to manage the implementation. For example, if you're implementing Core Human Capital Management applications, you could define a single project for that. But if you're implementing a broad solution footprint for a large business across multiple organizational entities in multiple countries, and with an implementation time of several years, a single project isn't enough. In such cases, organizations typically define a structure of a program with multiple underlying projects that reflect the scope, approach, timelines of business transformation. For example, you're implementing both HCM and ERP applications in a two-phased approach. You might decide to define a program with two underlying projects, one for HCM and one for ERP. For large, international business transformations, you can define multiple programs, each with multiple underlying projects. For example, you might first need to define a global design for a common way of working with HCM and then start rolling out that global design to individual countries. In such a scenario, you might define a program called HCM Transformation with a first project for global design, followed by multiple projects associated with individual countries. You could do the same for ERP. 12:16 Nikita: Mitchell, we’ve mentioned “cloud journey” a few times in this conversation, but can you tell us a little more about it? How can teams use it to guide their work? Mitchell: The main purpose of Oracle's cloud journey is to provide leading practices and actionable guidance to customers and implementation partners for successful implementations, operations within the cloud, and innovation through Oracle Cloud solutions. These are defined in terms of stages, activities, topics, and milestones. They focus on, how do you do the right things at the right time the first time. For customers, implementation partners in the cloud journey, this allows us to facilitate collaboration and transparency, accelerate the journey, and visualize and measure our progress. 12:59 Lois: We’ll stop here for today. Join us next week as we continue our discussion on Oracle Cloud Success Navigator.  Nikita: And if want to look at some demos of everything we touched upon today, head over to mylearn.oracle.com and take a look at the Oracle Cloud Success Navigator Essentials course. Until next time, this is Nikita Abraham… Lois: And Lois Houston, signing off! 13:22 That’s all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We’d also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

8 Juli 13min

In the final episode of this series on Oracle GoldenGate 23ai, Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham welcome back Nick Wagner, Senior Director of Product Management for GoldenGate, to discuss how parameters shape data replication. This episode covers parameter files, data selection, filtering, and transformation, providing essential insights for managing GoldenGate deployments.   Oracle GoldenGate 23ai: Fundamentals: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-goldengate-23ai-fundamentals/145884/237273 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. --------------------------------------------------------------- Podcast Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started! 00:25 Lois: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I’m Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Team Lead: Editorial Services.  Nikita: Hi everyone! This is the last episode in our Oracle GoldenGate 23ai series. Previously, we looked at how you can manage Extract Trails and Files. If you missed that episode, do go back and give it a listen.  00:50 Lois: Today, Nick Wagner, Senior Director of Product Management for GoldenGate, is back on the podcast to tell us about parameters, data selection, filtering, and transformation. These are key components of GoldenGate because they allow us to control what data is replicated, how it's transformed, and where it's sent. Hi Nick! Thanks for joining us again. So, what are the different types of parameter files? Nick: We have a GLOBALS parameter file and your runtime parameter files. The global one is going to affect all processes within a deployment. It's going to be things like where's your checkpoint table located in name, things like the heartbeat table. You want to have a single one of these across your entire deployment, so it makes sense to keep it within a single file. We also have runtime parameter files. This are going to be associated with a specific extract or replicat process. These files are located in your OGG_ETC_HOME/conf/ogg. The GLOBALS file is just simply named GLOBALS and all capitals, and your parameter file names for the processes themselves are named with the process.prm. So if my extract process is EXT demo, my parameter file name will be extdemo.prm. When you make changes to parameter files, they don't take effect until the process is restarted. So in the case of a GLOBALS parameter file, you need to restart the administration service. And in a runtime parameter file, you need to restart that specific process before any changes will take effect. We also have what we call a managed process setting profile. And this allows you to set up auto restart profiles for each process. And the GoldenGate Gate classic architecture, this was contained within the GLOBALS parameter file and handled by the manager. And microservices is a little bit different, it's handled by the service manager itself. But now we actually set up profiles. 02:41 Nikita: Ok, so what can you tell us about the extract parameter file specifically?  Nick: There's a couple things within the extract parameter file is common use. First, we want to tell what the group name is. So in this case, it would be our extract name. We need to put in information on where the extract process is going to be writing the data it captures to and that would be our trail files, and extract process can write to one or more trail files. We also want to list out the list of tables and schemas that we're going to be capturing, as well as any kind of DDL changes. If we're doing an initial load, we want to set up the SQL predicate to determine which tables are being captured and put a WHERE clause on those to speed up performance. We can also do filtering within the extract process as well. So we write just the information that we need to the trail file. 03:27 Nikita: And what are the common parameters within an extract process? Nick: There are a couple of common parameters within your extract process. We have table to list out the list of tables that GoldenGate is going to be capturing from. These can be wildcarded. So I can simply do table.star and GoldenGate will capture all the tables in that database. I can also do schema.star and it will capture all the tables within a schema. We have our EXTTRAIL command, which tells GoldenGate which trail to write to. If I want to filter out certain rows and columns, I can use the filter cols and cols except parameter. GoldenGate can also capture sequence changes. So we would use the sequence parameter. And then we can also set some high-level database options for GoldenGate that affect all the tables and that's configured using the tranlog options parameter.  04:14 Lois: Nick, can you talk a bit about the different types of tranlogoptions settings? How can they be used to control what the extract process does? Nick: So one of the first ones is ExcludeTag. So GoldenGate has the ability to exclude tagged transactions. Within the database itself, you can actually specify a transaction to be tagged using a DBMS set tag option. GoldenGate replicat also sets its transactions with a tag so that the GoldenGate process knows which transactions were done by the replicat and it can exclude them automatically. You can do exclude tag with a plus. That simply means to exclude any transaction that's been tagged with any value. You can also exclude specific tags.  Another good option for TranLogOptions is enable procedural replication. This allows GoldenGate to actually capture and replicate database procedure calls, and this would be things like DBMS AQ, NQ operations, or DQ operations. So if you're using Oracle advanced queuing and you need GoldenGate to replicate those changes, it can.  Another valuable tranlogoption setting is enable auto capture. Within the Oracle Database, you can actually set ALTER TABLE command that says ALTER TABLE, enable logical replication. Or when you create a table, you can actually do CREATE TABLE statement and at the end use the enable logical replication option for that CREATE TABLE statement. And this tells GoldenGate to automatically capture that table. One of the nice features about this is that I don't need to specify that table and my parameter file, and it'll automatically enable supplemental logging on that table for me using scheduling columns. So it makes it very easy to set up replication between Oracle databases.  06:01 Nikita: Can you tell us about replicat parameters, Nick? Nick: Within a replicat, we'll have the group name, some common other parameters that we'll use is a mapping parameter that allows us to map the source to target table relationships. We can do transformation within the replicat, as well as error handling and controlling group operations to improve performance. Some common replicat parameters include the replicat parameter itself, which tells us what the name of that replicat is. We have our map statement, which allows us to map a source object to a target object. We have things like rep error that control how to handle errors. Insert all records allows us to change and convert, update, and delete operations into inserts. We can do things like compare calls, which helps with active-active replication in determining which columns are used in the GoldenGate WHERE clause. We also have the ability to use macros and column mapping to do additional transformation and make the parameter file look elegant. 07:07 AI is being used in nearly every industry…healthcare, manufacturing, retail, customer service, transportation, agriculture, you name it! And it’s only going to get more prevalent and transformational in the future. It’s no wonder that AI skills are the most sought-after by employers. If you’re ready to dive in to AI, check out the OCI AI Foundations training and certification that’s available for free! It’s the perfect starting point to build your AI knowledge. So, get going! Head on over to mylearn.oracle.com to find out more. 07:47 Nikita: Welcome back! Let’s move on to some of the most interesting topics within GoldenGate… data mapping, selection, and transformation. As I understand, users can do pretty cool things with GoldenGate. So Nick, let’s start with how GoldenGate can manipulate, change, and map data between two different databases. Nick: The map statement within a Replicat parameter allows you to provide specifications on how you're going to map source and target objects. You can also use a map and an extract, but it's pretty rare. And that would be used if you needed to write the object name. Inside the trail files is a different name than the actual object name that you're capturing from. GoldenGate can also do different data selection, mapping, and manipulation, and this is all controlled within the Extract and Replicat parameter files. In the classic architecture of GoldenGate, you could do a rudimentary level of transformation and filtering within the extract pump. Now, the distribution service is only allowing you to do filtering. Any transformation that you had within the pump would need to be moved to the Extract or the Replicat process.  The other thing that you can do within GoldenGate is select and filter data based on different levels and conditions. So within your parameter clause, you have your Table and Map statement. That's the core of everything. You have your filtering. You have COLS and COLSEXCEPT, which allow you to determine which columns you're going to include or exclude from replication. The Table and Map statement works at the table level. The FILTER works at the row level. And COLS and COLSEXCEPTs works at the column level. We also have the ability to filter by operation type too. So GoldenGate has some very easy parameters called GitInserts, GitUpdates, GitDeletes, and conversely ignore updates, ignore deletes, ignore inserts. And that will affect the operation type. 09:40 Lois: Nick, are there any features that GoldenGate provides to make data replication easier? Nick: The first thing is that GoldenGate is going to automatically match your source and target column names with a parameter called USEDEFAULTS. You can specify it inside of your COLMAP clause, but again, it's a default, so you don't need to worry about it. We also handle all data type and character set conversion. Because we store the metadata in the trail, we know what that source data type is like. When we go to apply the record to the target table, the Replicat process is going to look up the definition of that record and keep a repository of that in memory. So that when it knows that, hey, this value coming in from the trail file is going to be of a date data type, and then this value in the target database is going to be a character data type, it knows how to convert that date to a character, and it'll do it for you. Most of the conversion is going to be done automatically for data types. Things where we don't do automatic data type conversion is if you're using abstract data types or user-defined data types, collections arrays, and then some types of CLOB operations. For example, if you're going from a BLOB to a JSON, that's not really going to work very well. Character set conversion is also done automatically. It's not necessarily done directly by GoldenGate, but it's done by the database engine. So there is a character set value inside that source database.  And when GoldenGate goes to apply those changes into the target system, it's ensuring that that character set is visible and named so that that database can do the necessary translation. You can also do advanced filtering transformation. There's tokens that you can attach from the source environment, database, or records into a record itself on the trail file. And then there's also a bunch of metadata that GoldenGate can use to attach to the record itself. And then of course, you can use data transformation within your COLMAP statement. 11:28 Nikita: Before we wrap up, what types of data transformations can we perform, Nick?  Nick: So there's quite a few different data transformations. We can do constructive or destructive transformation, aesthetic, and structural. 11:39 Lois: That’s it for the Oracle GoldenGate 23ai: Fundamentals series. I think we covered a lot of ground this season. Thank you, Nick, for taking us through it all.  Nikita: Yeah, thank you so much, Nick. And if you want to learn more, head over to mylearn.oracle.com and search for the Oracle GoldenGate 23ai: Fundamentals course. Until next time, this is Nikita Abraham… Lois: And Lois Houston, signing off! 12:04 That’s all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We’d also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

1 Juli 12min

In this episode of the Oracle University Podcast, Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham explore the intricacies of trail files in Oracle GoldenGate 23ai with Nick Wagner, Senior Director of Product Management.   They delve into how trail files store committed operations, preserving the order of transactions and capturing essential metadata. Nick explains that trail files are self-describing, containing database and table definition records, making them easier to work with. The episode also covers trail file management, including the purge trail task and the ability to download trail files directly from the web UI, providing flexibility in various deployment scenarios.   Oracle GoldenGate 23ai: Fundamentals: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-goldengate-23ai-fundamentals/145884/237273 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. ------------------------------------------------------------- Podcast Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started! 00:25 Nikita: Welcome back to another episode of the Oracle University Podcast! I’m Nikita Abraham, Team Lead of Editorial Services with Oracle University, and I’m joined by Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs. Lois: Hi there! In our last episode, we discussed the Replicat process. That was a good introduction, and you should give it a listen if you’re interested in the fundamentals of GoldenGate 23ai.  00:49 Nikita: Nick Wagner, Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle GoldenGate, is back with us today to talk about how to manage Extract Trails and Files. Hi Nick, it’s a pleasure to have you with us. So, we’ve spoken about trail files in our earlier episodes. But can you tell us about the kind of information that’s actually stored in these files?  Nick: The trail files contain committed operations only. In an Oracle environment, the extract process is actually able to understand and read both committed and uncommitted transactions. It holds the uncommitted activity and the cache manager associated settings. As a transaction is committed, it's then flushing that information to the trail file. All this information in the transaction is preserved, so we have not only the transaction itself, but the order of the operations within that transaction. All the changed columns, including the primary key and any scheduling columns are also captured, and this is controlled by the log or sub calls parameter and other parameters within the extract process. The data captured depends on settings in the extract file and you can include additional information, including tokens. The trail files also contain metadata information, where the trail files are what we call self-describing, which means that as we start reading in new objects, we start writing the definition of those objects into the trail file themselves. 02:11 Lois: Nick, what does the structure of a trail file look like? Nick: The trail files have a header information, which simply keeps information about what version of trail file this is, where GoldenGate is handling it, information about that trail file itself. You'll also have three different types of records. You'll have a data record, which contains the actual before and after images, the table update statement, the type of operations. You have a database definition record, which includes information about the database that GoldenGate is capturing from, and then you'll also have a table definition record. As GoldenGate starts up and creates a trail file for the first time, it's always going to write the trail file header and associated database definition record, and then it's going to start reading data out of the source database. As it encounters a new table for the first time in that trail file, it's going to write the metadata for that object as well. This makes it very easy. This means that within a single trail file, any data records I have in there, that trail file also contains the associated table definition record for that table. 03:20 Nikita: Let’s talk about compatibility between different versions of GoldenGate. How do the trail files fit into that? Nick: The GoldenGate trail files themselves have information built into them to help understand what they're compatible with as far as GoldenGate releases. If I'm replicating from a new version of GoldenGate to an older version of GoldenGate, I can set the format release value to tell the extract process to write these trail files in an older version. In this case, I can simply say format release 19 and it'll write the trail files in the 19C version. If you're going from an older version to a newer version of GoldenGate, it's automatically able to process the old version trail file structure without having to change anything.  04:02 Nikita: Now, GoldenGate is constantly generating these trail files as it runs. So, how do we manage them over time. What’s the cleanup process like? Nick: Within the GoldenGate microservices architecture, the web UI has a way to manage your trail files and clean them up. So there's a purge trail task that allows you to go in and set up rules on how long to keep the trail files around for before they're purged. We have customers that want to reposition extract and so you'll want to make sure that you keep trail files around long enough so that you can handle any reposition that you intend to do. Trail files will always be kept around even past their purge rules if they're still needed for GoldenGate recovery. Also new to GoldenGate 23ai is the ability to download trail files directly from the web UI. This is extremely helpful if you're using OCI GoldenGate or you don't have OS access on the machine where GoldenGate is running. 04:56 Lois: What if we want to look inside these trail files and actually see the individual records? How can we examine them directly? Nick: Well, that can be seen using a tool called Logdump. Logdumps utility, that's installed in your ogghome/bindirectory. It has online help as well as full documentation. 05:14 Lois: And how do you use Logdump? Nick: So to use Logdump, the first thing you'll do is launch the service and then you'll open a trail file. You would specify the full path of the trail file along with the path name and the sequence number of that trail file. Once you've set it up, you'll position into that location within that trail file. Normally people position at record 0 and then they'll do a next, which allows them to get the next information. There's a couple other commands in there, such as POS, which allows you to set the position, scan for header, allows you to scan to the next record if you position within the middle of a record. So, when you first run Logdump, it's not going to have very much information available for you. So, you'll want to turn on a couple of settings. You'll want to enable File Header, GHDR, and Detail to be able to see more information about what's going on within that record within the trail. Logdump also has the ability to show you the actual ASCII values as opposed to the text value. This is very useful for dealing with multibyte data as well as unprintable characters. You can also specify the length of the record to show for each Logdump record. And this is in the reclen parameter, 280 is a rough number and it will usually show about enough that'll fit on a single page. 06:40 Join the Oracle University Learning Community and tap into a vibrant network of over 1 million members, including Oracle experts and fellow learners. This dynamic community is the perfect place to grow your skills, connect with likeminded learners, and celebrate your successes. As a MyLearn subscriber, you have access to engage with your fellow learners and participate in activities in the community. Visit community.oracle.com/ou to check things out today! 07:12 Nikita: Welcome back! Nick, earlier you mentioned data records in trail files. What kind of information do these records contain? Nick: When we start looking at data records within the trail file, we're going to see a little bit different format. It's going to give us information about what type of operation this was, the before, after indicator, is this an after image or a before image? It's going to give us the time information. It's going to tell us what table this record was on and the values within that record. We can also count the number of records in a trail using the count option that tells us how many records in the trail, the average size, and then the operation type breakdown. We can also get some additional details on that count, including having it broken out by table and operation within those tables. This is really useful if you're trying to track down a missing record or an out of sync condition and you want to make sure that GoldenGate is appropriately capturing all the changes. We can also use an option within Logdump called scan for metadata. The shorthand for this command is sfmd, it allows you to scan for something like a database definition record.  You may have multiple database definition records versions within the same trail file. It tells us what type of database this was, the character set, which is important because this information is used by the replica when it goes to apply changes into the target database. We can also scan for metadata to get table definition records. The data types are numeric values that are associated with an internal GoldenGate data type. 08:43 Lois: Thank you, Nick, for your insights. There’s a lot more you can find in the Oracle GoldenGate 23ai: Fundamentals course on MyLearn. So, make sure you check that out by visiting mylearn.oracle.com. Nikita: Join us next week for a discussion on parameters, data selection, filtering, and transformation. Until then, this is Nikita Abraham… Lois: And Lois Houston signing off! 09:07 That’s all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We’d also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

24 Juni 9min

In this episode, Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Nick Wagner, Senior Director of Product Management, dive into the Replicat process in Oracle GoldenGate 23ai.   They discuss how Replicat applies changes to the target database, highlighting the different types: Classic, Coordinated, and Parallel Replicat.   Oracle GoldenGate 23ai: Fundamentals: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-goldengate-23ai-fundamentals/145884/237273 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started! 00:25 Lois: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Oracle University Podcast. I’m Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Team Lead: Editorial Services.  Nikita: Hi everyone! If you’ve been listening to us these last few weeks, you’ll know we’ve been discussing the fundamentals of GoldenGate 23ai. Today is going to be all about the Replicat process. Again, this is something we’ve discussed briefly in earlier episodes, but just to recap, the Replicat process applies changes from the source database to the target database. It's responsible for reading trail files and applying the changes to the target system. 01:04 Lois: That’s right, Niki. And we’ll be chatting with Nick Wagner, Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle GoldenGate. Hi Nick! Thanks for joining us again today. Let’s get straight into it. Can you give us an overview of the Replicat process? Nick: One thing that's very important is the Replicat is extremely chatty with that target database. So it's going to be going in and trying to make lots of little transactions on that system. The Replicat process only issues single row DML. So if you can imagine a source database that's generating hundreds of thousands of changes per second, we're going to have to have a Replicat process that can do 100,000 changes per second on that target site. That means that it's going to have to send a lot of little one record commands. And so we've got a lot of ways to optimize that. But in all situations you're really going to want very, very low ping time between that Replicat process and that target database. This often means that if you're going to be running GoldenGate in a cloud, you're going to want the Cloud GoldenGate environment to be running in that target data center, wherever that target database is. 02:06 Lois: What are the key characteristics of the process, Nick? Nick: Replicat process is going to read the changes from the trail file and then apply them to the target system, just like any database user would. It's not doing anything special where it's going under the covers and trying to apply directly to the database blocks. It's just applying regular standard insert, update, delete, and DDL statements to that target database. A single trail file does support high volume of data replication activity depending on the type of Replicat. Replicats do preserve the boundary of their transactions. So in the situations, by default, a transaction that's on the source, let's say five inserts followed by a commit will remain five inserts followed by a commit on the target site. There are some operations and changes that do affect this, but they're not turned on by default. There are things like group transactions that allows you to group multiple transactions into a single commit. This one could actually improve performance in some cases. We also have batch SQL that can change the boundaries of a transaction as well. And then in a Parallel Replicat, you actually have the ability to split a large transaction into multiple chunks and apply those chunks in Parallel. So again, by default, it's going to preserve the boundaries, but there are ways to change that. And then the Replicats use a checkpoint table to help with recovery and to know where they're applying data and what they've done. The other thing in here is, like an Extract process can write to multiple trails and write subsets of data to each one, a Replicat can only process a single set of trail files at once. So it's going to be attached to a specific trail file like trail file AB, and will only be able to read changes from trail file AB. If I have multiple trails that need to be applied into a target system, then I have to set up multiple Replicats to handle that. 03:54 Nikita: So, what are the different Replicat types, Nick? Nick: We have three types in the product today. We have Classic Replicat, which should really only be used for testing purposes or in environments that don't support any of the other specialized Replicats. We have Coordinated Replicat, which is a high speed apply mechanism to apply data into a target system. It does have some parallelism in it, but it's user defined parallelism. And then we have our flagship and that's Parallel Replicat. And this is the most performant lowest latency Replicat that we have. 04:25 Lois: Ok. Let’s dive a little deeper into each of them, starting with the Classic Replicat. How does it work? Nick: It's pretty straightforward. You're going to have a process that reads the trail files, and then in a single threaded fashion it's going to take the trail file logical change record, convert it to an insert, update, or delete, and then apply it into that target database. Each transaction that it does is preceded by a change to the checkpoint table. So when the transaction that the Replicat is currently doing is committed, that checkpoint table update also gets committed. That way when the Replicat restarts, it knows exactly what transaction it left off and how it last applied the record. And all the Replicats work the same way with regards to checkpoint tables. They each have their own little method of ensuring that the transaction they're applying is also reflected within the checkpoint table so that when it restarts, it knows exactly where it happened. That way, if a Replicat dies in the middle of a transaction, it can be restarted without any duplicate data or without missing data. 05:29 Did you know that Oracle University offers free courses on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure? You’ll find training on everything from multicloud, database, networking, and security to artificial intelligence and machine learning, all free for our subscribers. So, what are you waiting for? Pick a topic, head over to mylearn.oracle.com, and get started. 05:53 Nikita: Welcome back! Moving on, what about Coordinated Replicat? Nick: The Coordinated Replicat is going to read from a set of trail files. It's going to have multiple threads that do this. So you have your base thread, your coordinated thread that's going to be thread 1. It's going to process the data and apply it into that target database. You then have thread 2, 4, 5, 6, and so on. When you set up your Replicat parameter file for a Coordinated Replicat, the map commands that maps from one table on the source to a table on the target has an additional option. So you'll have an option called a range or thread range. With the range and thread range option, you can actually tell which table to go into which thread. 06:38 Lois: Can you give us an example of this? Nick: So I could say map Scott.M into thread 1 and I want Scott.Dept into thread 2. Well, this is fantastic until you realize that Scott.M and Scott.Dept have a foreign key between them or a child dependencies, parent-child relationships. What that means is that now I'm going to have to disable that foreign key on the target site, because there's no way for GoldenGate to coordinate the changes in one thread to another thread. And so you really have to be careful on how you pair your tables together. If you don't have any referential integrity on that target database, then you can use parallel coordinated Replicat to really high degrees of parallelism, and you get some very good performance out of it. Let's say that you have a table that's really got too much data for even a single thread to process, that's where the thread range comes in. And thread range command will use something like the table's primary key to split transactions on that table across multiple threads. So I can say, hey, take my table Scott.M and I want to spread transactions across threads 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14 and then spread them evenly based on the primary key. And Coordinated Replicat will do that. So you can get some very high performance numbers out of it and you can really fine tune the tables, especially if you know the amount of data coming into each one. While this does work great, we observed that a lot of customers really don't know their applications to that level of detail, and so we needed a different method to push data into that target database, where we could define the parallelism based on the database expectations. So instead of the customer having to try and figure out what are the parent-child relationships, why can't GoldenGate do it for me? And that led to Parallel Replicat.  08:26 Nikita: And what are the benefits and features of the Parallel Replicat process?  Nick: So Parallel Replicat has been around for quite a few years now. It supports most targets, it was Oracle initially, but now it's been expanded out to a lot of the non-Oracle targets and even some of the nonrelational database targets. It has absolutely the best performance of any Replicat process out there. You can use it to split large transactions as well. So if all of a sudden you have a batch job that does a million inserts followed by a single commit, I can split that across 10 threads, each thread doing 100,000 inserts. And it's aware of your transaction dependencies, that's the cool thing. So in Coordinated Replicat, you had to worry about how to split your tables up, in Parallel Replicat, we do it for you. 09:11 Lois: And how does Parallel Replicat work? Nick: So there's three main processes to the Parallel Replicat. You have your first is the mapper process. This is going to be responsible for taking the data out of the trail files and putting them into kind of our collator and scheduler box. As transactions go from the trail file, they get put into this box in memory where they're processed. There's a collator process that will look at these processes and go, OK, as they're coming in, let me read some of the data in them to determine how they can be applied in Parallel or not. And so the collator process understands the foreign key dependencies on that target database. And it's able to say, hey, I know that my two tables are these two tables, have a parent-child relationship, I need to make sure that changes on those tables go in the correct order. And so if all of a sudden you see an insert using the parent record and then another insert into the child record and they're mapped together, GoldenGate will ensure that those two transactions go serially and not parallel where they could get applied out of order. There's then a scheduler process that's going to look at this and say, OK, now that I'm taking transactions from the collator process, who's already identified whether or not transactions can be applied in parallel or serial, and I'm going to feed them off to applier processes that are ready and waiting for me to apply those changes into the database. And then the applier process is waiting for the scheduler process to send its transactions and say, OK, what's my next one? Where's the next transaction I should be working on and applying? And then the applier process is the one actually applying the changes into that target database, again, just using standard DML operations. So there's a lot of benefits to this one. You don't need to worry about your foreign key dependencies, you can leave all your foreign keys enabled. The collator process will actually use information within the trail file to determine which transactions can be applied in parallel, and which one needs to be applied serially. 11:13 Lois: Thank you, Nick, for this insightful conversation. There’s loads more to discover about the Replicat process, and you can do that by heading over to mylearn.oracle.com and searching for the Oracle GoldenGate 23ai: Fundamentals course. Nikita: In our next episode, Nick will take us through managing Extract Trails and Files. Until then, this is Nikita Abraham… Lois: And Lois Houston, signing off! 11:37 That’s all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We’d also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

17 Juni 12min

In this episode, Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham dive into key components of Oracle GoldenGate 23ai with expert insights from Nick Wagner, Senior Director of Product Management.   They break down the Distribution Service, explaining how it moves trail files between environments, replaces the classic extract pump, and ensures secure data transfer. Nick also introduces Target Initiated Paths, a method for connecting less secure environments to more secure ones, and discusses how the Receiver Service simplifies monitoring and management. The episode wraps up with a look into Initial Load, covering different methods for syncing source and target databases without downtime.   Oracle GoldenGate 23ai: Fundamentals: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-goldengate-23ai-fundamentals/145884/237273 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started! 00:25 Nikita: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I’m Nikita Abraham, Team Lead of Editorial Services with Oracle University, and with me is Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs.  Lois: Hey there! Last week, we spoke about the Extract process and today we’re going to spend time discussing the Distribution Path, Target Initiated Path, Receiver Server, and Initial Load. These are all critical components of the GoldenGate architecture, and understanding how they work together is essential for successful data replication. 00:58 Nikita: To help us navigate these topics, we’ve got Nick Wagner joining us again. Nick is a Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle GoldenGate. Hi Nick! Thanks for being with us today. To kick things off, can you tell us what the distribution service is and how it works? Nick: A distribution path is used when we need to send trail files between two different GoldenGate environments. The distribution service replaces the extract pump that was used in GoldenGate classic architecture. And so the distribution service will send the trail files as they're being created to that receiver service and it will write the trail files over on the target system. The distribution service works in a kind of a streaming fashion, so it's constantly pulling the trail files that the extract is creating to see if there's any new data. As soon as it sees new data, it'll packet it up and send it across the network to the receiver service. It can use a couple of different methods to do this. The most secure and recommended method is using a WebSocket secure connection or WSS. If you're going between a microservices and a classic architecture, you can actually tell the distribution service to send it using the classic architecture method. In that case, it's the OGG option when you're configuring the distribution service. There's also some unsecured methods that would send the trail files in plain text. The receiver service is then responsible for taking that data and rewriting it into the trail file on the target site. 02:23 Lois: Nick, what are some of the key features and responsibilities of the distribution service? Nick: It's responsible for command deployment. So any time that you're going to actually make a command to the distribution service, it gets handled there directly. It can handle multiple commands concurrently. It's going to dispatch trail files to one or more receiver servers so you can actually have a single distribution path, send trail files to multiple targets. It can provide some lightweight filtering so you can decide which tables get sent to the target system. And it also is integrated in with our data streams, our pub and subscribe model that we've added in GoldenGate 23ai. 03:01 Lois: Interesting. And are there any protocols to remember when using the distribution service? Nick: We always recommend a secure WebSocket. You also have proxy support for use within cloud environments. And then if you're going to a classic architecture GoldenGate, you would use the Oracle GoldenGate protocol. So in order to communicate with the distribution service and send it commands, you can communicate directly from any web browser, client software-- installation is not required-- or you can also do it through the admin client if necessary, but you can do it directly through browsers. 03:33 Nikita: Ok, let's move on to the target initiated path. Nick, what is it and what does it do essentially? Nick: This is used when you're communicating from a less secure environment to a more secure environment. Often, this requires going through some sort of DMZ. In these situations, a connection cannot be established from the less secure environment into the more secure environment. It actually needs to be established from the more secure environment out. And so if we need to replicate data into a more secure environment, we need to actually have the target GoldenGate environment initiate that connection so that it can be established.  And that's what a target-initiated path does. 04:12 Lois: And how do you set it up? Nick: It's pretty straightforward to set up. You actually don't even need to worry about it on the source side. You actually set it up and configure it from the target. The receiver service is responsible for receiving the trail file data and writing it to the local trail file. In this situation, we have a target-initiated path created. And so that receiver service is going to write the trail files locally and the replicat is going to apply that data into that target system. 04:37 Nikita: I also want to ask you about the Receiver service. What is it really? Nick: Receiver service is pretty straightforward. It's a centrally controlled service. It allows you to view the status of your distribution path and replaces target side collectors that were available in the classic architecture of GoldenGate. You can also get statistics about the receiver service directly from the web UI.  You can get detailed information about these paths by going into the receiver service and identifying information like network details, transfer protocols, how many bytes it's received, how many bytes it's sent out. If you need to issue commands from the admin client to the receiver service, you can use the info command to get details about it. Info all will tell you everything that's running. And you can see that your receiver service is up and running. 05:28 Are you working towards an Oracle Certification this year? Join us at one of our certification prep live events in the Oracle University Learning Community. Get insider tips from seasoned experts and learn from others who have already taken their certifications. Go to community.oracle.com/ou to jump-start your journey towards certification today! 05:53 Nikita: Welcome back. In the last section of today’s episode, we’ll cover what Initial Load is. Nick, can you break down the basics for us? Nick: So, the initial load is really used when you need to synchronize the source and target systems. Because GoldenGate is designed for 24/7 environments, we need to be able to do that initial load without taking downtime on the source. And so all the methods that we talk about do not require any downtime for that source database. 06:18 Lois: How do you do the initial load? Nick: So there's a couple of different ways to do the initial load. And it really depends on what your topology is. If I'm doing like-to-like replication in a homogeneous environment, we'll say Oracle-to-Oracle, the best options are to use something that's integrated with GoldenGate, some sort of precise instantiation method that does not require HandleCollisions. That's something like a database backup and restoring it to a specific SDN or CSN value using a Database Snapshot. Or in some cases, we can use Oracle Data Pump integration with GoldenGate. There are some less precise instantiation options, which do require HandleCollisions. We also have dissimilar initial load methods. And this is typically when you're going between heterogeneous environments. When my source and target databases don't match and there isn't any kind of fast unload or fast load utility that I could use between those two databases. In almost all cases, this does require HandleCollisions to be used. 07:16 Nikita: Got it. So, with so many options available, are there any advantages to using GoldenGate's own initial load method?  Nick: While some databases do have very good fast load and unload utilities, there are some advantages to using GoldenGate's own initial load method. One, it supports heterogeneous replication environments. So if I'm going from Postgres to Oracle, it'll do all the data type transformation, character set transformation for me. It doesn't require any downtime, if certain conditions are met.  It actually performs transformation as the data is loaded, too, as well as filtering. And so any transformation that you would be doing in your normal transaction log replication or CDC replication can also go through the same transformation for the initial load process. GoldenGate's initial load process does read directly from the source tables. And it fetches the data in arrays. It also uses parallel processing to speed up the replication. It does also handle activity on the source tables during the initial load process, so you do not need to worry about quiescing that source database. And a lot of the initial load methods directly built into GoldenGate support distributed application analytics targets, including things like Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery. 08:28 Lois: And what about its limitations? Or to put it differently, when should users consider using different methods? Nick: So the first thing to consider is system proximity. We want to make sure that the two systems we're working with are close together. Or if not, how are we going to send the data across? One thing to keep in mind, when we do the initial load, the source database is not quiesced. So if it takes an hour to do the initial load or 10 hours, it really doesn't matter to GoldenGate. So that's something to keep in mind. Even though we talk about performance of this, the performance really isn't as critical as one might suspect. So the important thing about data system proximity is the proximity to the extract and replicat processes that are going to be pulling the data out and pushing it across. And then how much data is generated? Are we talking about a database that's just a couple of gigabytes? Or are we talking about a database that's hundreds of terabytes? Do we want to consider outage time? Would it be faster to take a little bit of outage and use some other method to move the data across? What kind of outage or downtime windows do we have for these environments? And then another consideration is disk space. As we're pulling the data out of that source database, we need to have somewhere to store it. And if we don't have enough disk space, we need to run to temporary space or to use multiple external drives to be able to support it. So these are all different considerations. 09:50 Nikita: I think we can wind up our episode with that. Thanks, Nick, for giving us your insights.  Lois: If you'd like to learn more about the topics we covered today, head over to mylearn.oracle.com and check out the Oracle GoldenGate 23ai: Fundamentals course. Nikita: In our next episode, Nick will take us through the Replicat process. Until then, this is Nikita Abraham… Lois: And, Lois Houston signing off! 10:14 That’s all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We’d also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

10 Juni 10min

The Extract process is the heart of Oracle GoldenGate 23ai, capturing data changes with precision. In this episode, Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham sit down with Nick Wagner, Senior Director of Product Management, to break down Extract’s role, architecture, and best practices.   Learn how Extract works across different setups, from running on source databases to using a Hub model for greater flexibility. Additionally, understand how trail files, parameter files, and naming conventions impact performance.   Oracle GoldenGate 23ai: Fundamentals: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-goldengate-23ai-fundamentals/145884/237273 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. -------------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started! 00:25 Lois: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I’m Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me today is Nikita Abraham, Team Lead: Editorial Services.  Nikita: Hi everyone! Last week, we spoke about installing GoldenGate and today, we’re diving into the Extract process. We’ve discussed it briefly in an earlier episode, but to recap, the Extract process captures changes from the source database and writes them to a trail file. 00:54 Lois: Joining us again is Nick Wagner, Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle GoldenGate. Hi Nick! Before we get into the Extract process, can you walk us through the different architecture options available for GoldenGate. Let’s start with when GoldenGate is installed on the same server as the source database. What are the benefits of this architecture? Nick: There's a couple of advantages to this. It means that GoldenGate can use the same resources on that source database. It means that you don't need another host to support the GoldenGate environment. It also means that GoldenGate can use a bequeathed connection to connect from the Extract process into the source database to make it run faster. The restrictions on this are that the Replicat process is highly communicative with the target database. What that really means is that the Replicat process is constantly doing lots of little transactions. And so the network latency between the Replicat process and the target database should really be around 4 milliseconds or less for optimal performance. So that means that a lot of people can't really run GoldenGate on the source system, even though it's an option, because they need that Replicat latency performance. And so they'll often install GoldenGate on the same server as the target database. In this case, they can use the Replicat to connect using a bequeath connection to that target system, you know that it's going to be highly performant and that latency is not going to be an issue. This works really well because the Extract process has actually been optimized to do remote capture. And so it's actually able to handle 80 milliseconds round trip ping time or less between the actual Extract process and the source database itself. And so a lot of customers will opt for this method, where they're actually running GoldenGate away from the target, or excuse me, away from the source database. 02:44 Nikita: Interesting. And is there an option where you don’t need to install GoldenGate on the actual source or target database? Nick: We also have another architecture pattern called a Hub model. And this is what you would see in something like OCI GoldenGate or OCI Marketplace, or even in third party clouds environments where you don't have the ability to install GoldenGate on the actual source or target database. In these cases, GoldenGate is just going to run on a virtual machine or an environment that you have set up specifically for GoldenGate. Now, this GoldenGate Hub doesn't need to have any database software installed. It doesn't need to have any database information on it. It's simply working as a client. So GoldenGate Extract process is a client connecting into the source database and the Replicat is a client connecting into the target database. And this really gives you a lot of flexibility. However, in some cases, there may be too much of a distance, so you won't be able to get both less than 80 milliseconds on the source side in less than 4 milliseconds on the round trip on the target side. And so in that case, you can have multiple GoldenGate Hubs. And so you would have a Hub on the Extract side and another Hub on the Replicat side. And all these are fully accessible. In this case, you'll actually use the distribution service to send the trail files from one system to another.  04:00 Lois: So, coming to the Extract process, what does it actually do?  Nick: The Extract process is configured to capture changes from that source database. In different terminology, it can subscribe to a topic if we're pulling data out of a Kafka queue or a topic or some messaging system like a JMS queue and relational database language, we're pulling database from the database transaction logs. There's a lot of different sources and targets. You can always use the GoldenGate Certification Matrix to determine which sources and targets are supported, and where we can extract data from. The capture process also connects to the source table for initial loads. When we do the initial load, instead of reading from the transaction logs, GoldenGate is actually going to do a select star on that table to get the information it needs for that load. 04:49 Lois: And what about the Extract process group?  Nick: The process group is kind of a grouping of the process itself, which is either going to be my Extract or Replicat and associated files. So in an Extract environment, we have our parameter file and a report file and our checkpoint files. The parameter file, the .prm file, is going to list out which objects we're going to capture and how we're going to capture that data. It also controls what we're going to be writing to the trail file and where that trail file exists. The report file is really just a log of what's going on in that Extract process, how it's working, what tables it's encountered. It's used for any troubleshooting to make sure everything is running smoothly. And then you also have the checkpoint files. The checkpoint files and report files should not be modified by the user, the parameter file can be. The checkpoint files are going to include information about where that process is reading from, where it's writing to, and any open transaction that it's tracking as part of the bounded recovery or cache manager functionality. 05:54 Nikita: How do you go about creating an Extract group? Nick: The Extract group can be created by doing an Add Extract command or through the UI. Each Extract must also have a unique name. On the Extract process side, there is an eight-character hard limit for the name itself. And so, you can’t have an Extract process called my Extract for today is called Nick. More than eight characters. 06:17 Lois: Nick, I was wondering, is there a simple way to identify what an Extract or Replicat is doing? Nick: If you need something to help identify what that Extract or Replicat is doing or the description of it, we do have a description field. So when you do the Add Extract or Add Replicat, there is a DESC field that allows you to add more details in. And this is really key because it allows you to put a lot more information that’s going to show up in all the log files at the service manager level. And any time you do an info on the service it’ll also bring up that description field so you can see what’s going on. That way, if you get an alert, a watch, you need to keep track of something you can easily identify what that process is doing and what it’s replicating for.  07:06 Adopting a multicloud strategy is a big step towards future-proofing your business and we’re here to help you navigate this complex landscape. With our suite of courses, you'll gain insights into network connectivity, security protocols, and the considerations of working across different cloud platforms. Start your journey to multicloud today by visiting mylearn.oracle.com. 07:32 Nikita: Welcome back! Before the break, we were talking about the description field, which helps identify what the Extract is doing. Nick, are there any best practices to keep in mind when naming a group? Nick: You also don't want to use any special characters when naming the group, especially you know things like slashes or dashes. You don't want to use spaces in them, just really stick to alphanumeric characters only. The group names are also case insensitive, so EDEPT, all capitalized is the same as edept lowercase. The other thing that you don't want to do and this isn't a hard restriction, it's just more of a friendly reminder is don't end your group with a numeric value. The report files themselves end in numeric values, so you'll have a report file, 0123456789, and so on. If you were to end your group name with a numeric value, then it can often be confused for a report file. And so you don't want to really do that. But otherwise you're free to call it whatever you want. 08:39 Lois: Got it. What about naming conventions? Are there any rules that apply? Nick: You can use whatever naming convention you want, but again, try and follow these best practices. No strange characters and don't end your process names with a numeric value. 08:53 Nikita: Can you explain the role of parameter and trail files in the Extract process? Nick: The parameter files is really where GoldenGate is doing all of its hard work. And there's two parameter files, there's the GLOBALS file that's configured at the service manager level, and then you have your actual process parameter files that are configured at your Extract, Replicat, distribution service levels. We also have our trail files. We've talked a little bit about the trail file as they're the continuous source of information for GoldenGate. They can exist on the source or target or intermediate system. An Extract process can write to multiple trail files, but a trail file can only be written to by one process at a time. A trail file also consists of a two-letter abbreviation, and then we have that nine-digit sequence number. And then the processes that read a trail file include the Distribution Path or Target Initiated Path, as well as the Replicat. And again, just as a quick reminder, all the trail files are stored in the ogg_var_home/libdata directory. This is important because they do grow pretty rapidly, and so if you need to keep track of the space used in that directory, this is an important thing to do. 10:05 Nikita: How does GoldenGate handle data extraction for different database systems? Nick: You have a couple of different options. There's for non-Oracle databases, you have a classic extract. And these read directly from the transaction logs themselves or they call an API within that target database. For example, within DB2, we actually use the DB2 API to pull data out of the transaction logs. In something like Postgres, we're getting data directly out of the transaction logs by reading it. And that's put in there by the test decoding plugin. With Oracle, it's a little bit different. Because it's actually integrated in with the database kernel itself, all the log mining is done inside the database engine. All GoldenGate is doing is connecting to that log mining area and getting the data from it. We also have the option of doing standby redo logs or downstream capture, which allows GoldenGate to read data from the standby redo logs. It's still an integrated extract. So GoldenGate isn't directly reading the standby redo logs, but it allows you to set it up in a different way. And then we have an initial load extract, which is to pull out the base data out of the tables by doing a select star on the tables. And this does not include any change data. So the initial loads and the what we call tran log extracts are separate. 11:24 Lois: Before we wrap up, can you quickly walk us through the key steps to configure an extract? Nick: So the first thing we want to do is set up a restart profile so that if the process fails, it'll automatically restart. Next thing we do is we create the extract parameter file. Then we'll go ahead and register the extract with the database. This is important in Oracle and also with a couple of other databases that we support where we actually need to tell the database engine that, hey, we're going to be setting up a process that's going to pull data out of that environment. Then we go ahead and add the extract process. We add the trail file so that it knows where to write to. And then we can go ahead and start the extract process and we'll be on our way to configuring replication. If necessary, we can configure a distribution service path as well. 12:09 Nikita: Thanks, Nick, for telling us about the Extract process. If you'd like to learn more about what we discussed today, head over to mylearn.oracle.com and check out the Oracle GoldenGate 23ai: Fundamentals course. Lois: You'll find detailed instructions to help you get started. In the next episode, we’ll go through the Distribution Path, Target Initiated Path, Receiver Server, and Initial Load. Until then, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off! 12:37 That’s all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We’d also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

3 Juni 13min

Installing Oracle GoldenGate 23ai is more than just running a setup file—it’s about preparing your system for efficient, reliable data replication. In this episode, Lois Houston and Nikita welcome back Nick Wagner to break down system requirements, storage considerations, and best practices for installing GoldenGate.   You’ll learn how to optimize disk space, manage trail files, and configure network settings to ensure a smooth installation.   Oracle GoldenGate 23ai: Fundamentals: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-goldengate-23ai-fundamentals/145884/237273 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   -------------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started! 00:25 Nikita: Hello and welcome to Oracle University Podcast! I’m Nikita Abraham, Team Lead of Editorial Services with Oracle University, and I’m joined by Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs.  Lois: Hi there! Last week, we took a close look at the security strategies of Oracle GoldenGate 23ai. In this episode, we’ll discuss all aspects of installing GoldenGate. 00:48 Nikita: That’s right, Lois. And back with us today is Nick Wagner, Senior Director of Product Management for GoldenGate at Oracle. Hi Nick! I’m going to get straight into it. What are the system requirements for a typical GoldenGate installation? Nick: As far as system requirements, we're going to split that into two sections. We've got an operating system requirements and a storage requirements. So with memory and disk, and I know that this isn't the answer you want, but the answer is that it varies. With GoldenGate, the amount of CPU usage that is required depends on the number of extracts and replicats. It also depends on the number of threads that you're going to be using for those replicats. Same thing with RAM and disk usage. That's going to vary on the transaction sizes and the number of long running transactions. 01:35 Lois: And how does the recovery process in GoldenGate impact system resources?  Nick: You've got two things that help the extract recovery. You've got the bonded recovery that will store transactions over a certain length of time to disk. It also has a cache manager setting that determines what gets written to disk as part of open transactions. It's not just the simple answer as, oh, it needs this much space. GoldenGate also needs to store trail files for the data that it's moving across. So if there's network latency, or if you expect a certain network outage, or you have certain SLAs for the target database that may not be met, you need to make sure that GoldenGate has enough room to store its trail files as it's writing them. The good news about all this is that you can track it. You can use parameters to set them. And we do have some metrics that we'll provide to you on how to size these environments. So a couple of things on the disk usage. The actual installation of GoldenGate is about 1 to 1.5 gig in size, depending on which version of GoldenGate you're going to be using and what database. The trail files themselves, they default to 500 megabytes apiece. A lot of customers keep them on disk longer than they're necessary, and so there's all sorts of purging options available in GoldenGate. But you can set up purge rules to say, hey, I want to get rid of my trail files as soon as they're not needed anymore. But you can also say, you know what? I want to keep my trail files around for x number of days, even if they're not needed. That way they can be rebuilt. I can restore from any previous point in time. 03:15 Nikita: Let’s talk a bit more about trail files. How do these files grow and what settings can users adjust to manage their storage efficiently? Nick: The trail files grow at about 30% to 35% of the generated redo log data. So if I'm generating 100 gigabytes of redo an hour, then you can expect the trail files to be anywhere from 30 to 35 gigabytes an hour of generated data. And this is if you're replicating everything. Again, GoldenGate's got so many different options. There's so many different ways to use it. In some cases, if you're going to a distributed applications and analytics environment, like a Databricks or a Snowflake, you might want to write more information to the trail file than what's necessary. Maybe I want additional information, such as when this change happened, who the user was that made that change. I can add specific token data. You can also tell GoldenGate to log additional records or additional columns to the trail file that may not have been changed. So I can always say, hey, GoldenGate, replicate and store the entire before and after image of every single row change to your trail file, even if those columns didn't change. And so there's a lot of different ways to do it there. But generally speaking, the default settings, you're looking at about 30% to 35% of the generated redo log value. System swap can fill up quickly. You do want this as a dedicated disk as well. System swap is often used for just handling of the changes, as GoldenGate flushes data from memory down to disk. These are controlled by a couple of parameters. So because GoldenGate is only writing committed activity to the trail file, the log reader inside the database is actually giving GoldenGate not only committed activity but uncommitted activity, too. And this is so it can stay very high speed and very low latency. 05:17 Lois: So, what are the parameters? Nick: There's a cache manager overall feature, and there's a cache directory. That directory controls where that data is actually stored, so you can specify the location of the uncommitted transactions. You can also specify the cache size. And there's not only memory settings here, but there's also disk settings. So you can say, hey, once a cache size exceeds a certain memory usage, then start flushing to disk, which is going to be slower. This is for systems that maybe have less memory but more high-speed disk. You can optimize these parameters as necessary. 05:53 Nikita: And how does GoldenGate adjust these parameters? Nick: For most environments, you're just going to leave them alone. They're automatically configured to look at the system memory available on that system and not use it all. And then as soon as necessary, it'll overflow to disk. There's also intelligent settings built within these parameters and within the cache manager itself that if it starts seeing a lull in activity or your traditional OLTP type responses to actually free up the memory that it has allocated. Or if it starts seeing more activity around data warehousing type things where you're doing large transactions, it'll actually hold on to memory a little bit longer. So it kinda learns as it goes through your environment and starts replicating data. 06:37 Lois: Is there anything else you think we should talk about before we move on to installing GoldenGate?  Nick: There's a couple additional things you need to think of with the network as well. So when you're deploying GoldenGate, you definitely want it to use the fastest network.  GoldenGate can also use a reverse proxy, especially important with microservices. Reverse proxy, typically we recommend Nginx. And it allows you to access any of the GoldenGate microservices using a single port.  GoldenGate also needs either host names or IP addresses to do its communication and to ensure the system is available. It does a lot of communication through TCP and IP as well as WSS. And then it also handles firewalls. So you want to make sure that the firewalls are open for ingress and egress for GoldenGate, too. There's a couple of different privileges that GoldenGate needs when you go to install it. You'll want to make sure that GoldenGate has the ability to write to the home where you're installing it. That's kind of obvious, but we need to say it anyways. There's a utility called oggca.sh. That's the GoldenGate Configuration Assistant that allows you to set up your first deployments and manage additional deployments. That needs permissions to write to the directories where you're going to be creating the new deployments. The extract process needs connection and permissions to read the transaction logs or backups. This is not important for Oracle, but for non-Oracle it is. And then we also recommend a dedicated database user for the extract and replicat connections. 08:15 Are you keen to stay ahead in today's fast-paced world? We’ve got your back! Each quarter, Oracle rolls out game-changing updates to its Fusion Cloud Applications. And to make sure you’re always in the know, we offer New Features courses that give you an insider’s look at all of the latest advancements. Don't miss out! Head over to mylearn.oracle.com to get started. 08:41 Nikita: Welcome back! So Nick, how do we get started with the installation?  Nick: So when we go to the install, the first thing you're going to do is go ahead and go to Oracle's website and download the software. Because of the way that GoldenGate works, there's only a couple moving parts. You saw the microservices. There's five or six of them. You have your extract, your replicat, your distribution service, trail files. There's not a lot of moving components. So if something does go wrong, usually it affects multiple customers. And so it's very important that when you go to install GoldenGate, you're using the most recent bundle patch. And you can find this within My Oracle Support. It's not always available directly from OTN or from the Oracle e-delivery website. You can still get them there, but we really want people going to My Oracle Support to download the most recent version. There's a couple of environment variables and certificates that you'll set up as well. And then you'll run the Configuration Assistant to create your deployments.  09:44 Lois: Thanks, Nick, for taking us though the installation of GoldenGate. Because these are highly UI-driven topics, we recommend that you take a deep dive into the GoldenGate 23ai Fundamentals course, available on mylearn.oracle.com. Nikita: In our next episode, we’ll talk about the Extract process. Until then, this is Nikita Abraham… Lois: And Lois Houston signing off! 10:08 That’s all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We’d also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

27 Maj 10min

GoldenGate 23ai takes security seriously, and this episode unpacks everything you need to know. GoldenGate expert Nick Wagner breaks down how authentication, access roles, and encryption protect your data.   Learn how GoldenGate integrates with identity providers, secures communication, and keeps passwords out of storage. Understand how trail files work, why they only store committed data, and how recovery processes prevent data loss.   Whether you manage replication or just want to tighten security, this episode gives you the details to lock things down without slowing operations.   Oracle GoldenGate 23ai: Fundamentals: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-goldengate-23ai-fundamentals/145884/237273 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   --------------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started! 00:25 Lois: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I’m Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Team Lead: Editorial Services.  Nikita: Welcome, everyone! This is our fourth episode on Oracle GoldenGate 23ai. Last week, we discussed the terminology, different processes and what they do, and the architecture of the product at a high level. Today, we have Nick Wagner back with us to talk about the security strategies of GoldenGate. 00:56 Lois: As you know by now, Nick is a Senior Director of Product Management for GoldenGate at Oracle. He’s played a key role as one of the product designers behind the latest version of GoldenGate. Hi Nick! Thank you for joining us again. Can you tell us how GoldenGate takes care of data security? Nick: So GoldenGate authentication and authorization is done in a couple of different ways. First, we have user credentials for GoldenGate for not only the source and target databases, but also for GoldenGate itself. We have integration with third-party identity management products, and everything that GoldenGate does can be secured. 01:32 Nikita: And we must have some access roles, right? Nick: There's four roles built into the GoldenGate product. You have your security role, administrator, operator, and user. They're all hierarchical. The most important one is the security user. This user is going to be the one that provides the administrative tasks. This user is able to actually create additional users and assign roles within the product. So do not lose this password and this user is extremely important. You probably don't want to use this security user as your everyday user. That would be your administrator. The administrator role is able to perform all administrative tasks within GoldenGate. So not only can they go in and create new extracts, create new replicats, create new distribution services, but they can also start and stop them. And that's where the operator role is and the user role. So the operator role allows you to go in and start/stop processes, but you can't create any new ones, which is kind of important. So this user would be the one that could go in and suspend activity. They could restart activity. But they can't actually add objects to replication. The user role is really a read-only role. They can come in. They can see what's going on. They can look at the log files. They can look at the alerts. They can look at all the watches and see exactly what GoldenGate is doing. But they're unable to make any changes to the product itself. 02:54 Lois: You mentioned the roles are hierarchical in nature. What does that mean? Nick: So anything that the user role does can be done by the operator. Anything that the operator and user roles can do can be done by the administrator. And anything that the user, operator, and administrator roles do can be done by the security role. 03:11 Lois: Ok. So, is there a single sign-on available for GoldenGate? Nick: We also have a password plugin for GoldenGate Connections. A lot of customers have asked for integration with whatever their single sign-on utility is, and so GoldenGate now has that with GoldenGate 23ai. So these are customer-created entities. So, we have some examples that you can use in our documentation on how to set up an identity provider or a third-party identity provider with GoldenGate. And this allows you to ensure that your corporate standards are met. As we started looking into this, as we started designing it, every single customer wanted something different. And so instead of trying to meet the needs for every customer and every possible combination of security credentials, we want you to be able to design it the way you need it. The passwords are never stored. They're only retrieved from the identity provider by the plugin itself. 04:05 Nikita: That’s a pretty important security aspect…that when it’s time to authenticate a user, we go to the identity provider. Nick: We're going to connect in and see if that password is matching. And only then do we use it. And as soon as we detect that it's matched, that password is removed. And then for the extract and replicats themselves, you can also use it for the database, data source, and data target connections, as well as for the GoldenGate users. So, it is a full-featured plugin. So, our identity provider plugin works with IAM as well as OAM. These are your standard identity manager authentication methods. The standard one is OAuth 2, as well as OIDC. And any Identity Manager that uses that is able to integrate with GoldenGate. 04:52 Lois: And how does this work? Nick: The way that it works is pretty straightforward. Once the user logs into the database, we're going to hand off authentication to the identity provider. Once the identity provider has validated that user's identity and their credentials, then it comes back to GoldenGate and says that user is able to log in to either GoldenGate or the application or the database. Once the user is logged in, we get that confirmation that's been sent out and they can continue working through GoldenGate. So, it's very straightforward on how it works. There's also a nice little UI that will help set up each additional user within those systems. All the communication is also secured as well. So any communication done through any of the GoldenGate services is encrypted using HTTPS. All the REST calls themselves are all done using HTTPS as well. All the data protection calls and all the communication across the network when we send data across a distribution service is encrypted using a secure WebSocket. And there's also trail file encryption at the operating system level for data at REST. So, this really gives you the full level of encryption for customers that need that high-end security. GoldenGate does have an option for FIPS 140-2 compliance as well. So that's even a further step for most of those customers. 06:12 Nikita: That’s impressive! Because we want to maintain the highest security standards, right? Especially when dealing with sensitive information. I now want to move on to trail files. In our last episode, we briefly spoke about how they serve as logs that record and track changes made to data. But what more can you tell us about them, Nick? Nick: There's two different processes that write to the trail files. The extract process will write to the trail file and the receiver service will write to the trail file. The extract process is going to write to the trail file as it's pulling data out of that source database. Now, the extract process is controlled by a parameter file, that says, hey, here's the exact changes that I'm going to be pulling out. Here's the tables. Here's the rows that I want. As it's pulling that data out and writing it to the trail files, it's ensuring that those trail files have enough information so that the replicat process can actually construct a SQL statement and apply that change to that target platform. And so there's a lot of ways to change what's actually stored in those trail files and how it's handled. The trail files can also be used for initial loads. So when we do the initial load through GoldenGate, we can grab and write out the data for those tables, and that excludes the change data. So initial loads is pulling the data directly from the tables themselves, whereas ongoing replication is pulling it from the transaction logs. 07:38 Lois: But do we need to worry about rollbacks? Nick: Our trail files contain committed data only and all data is sequential. So this is two important things. Because it contains committed data only, we don't need to worry about rollbacks. We also don't need to worry about position within that trail file because we know all data is sequential. And so as we're reading through the trail file, we know that anything that's written in a prior location in that trial file was committed prior to something else. And as we get into the recovery aspects of GoldenGate, this will all make a lot more sense. 08:13 Lois: Before we do that, can you tell us about the naming of trail files? Nick: The trail files as far as naming, because these do reside on the operating system, you start with a two-letter trail file abbreviation and then a nine-digit sequential value. So, you almost look at it as like an archive log from Oracle, where we have a prefix and then an affix, which is numeric. Same kind of thing. So, we have our two-letter, in this case, an ab, and then we have a nine-digit number. 08:47 Transform the way you work with Oracle Database 23ai! This cutting-edge technology brings the power of AI directly to your data, making it easier to build powerful applications and manage critical workloads. Want to learn more about Database 23ai? Visit mylearn.oracle.com to pick from our range of courses and enroll today! 09:12 Nikita: Welcome back! Ok, Nick. Let’s get into the GoldenGate recovery process. Nick: When we start looking at the GoldenGate recovery process, it essentially makes GoldenGate kind of point-in-time like. So on that source database, you have your extract process that's going to be capturing data from the transaction logs. In the case of Oracle, the Oracle Database is actually going to be reading those transaction logs from us and passing the change records directly to GoldenGate. We call them an LCR, Logical Change Record. And so the integrated extract and GoldenGate, the extract portion tells the database, hey, I'm now going to be interested in the following list of tables. And it gives a list of tables to that internal component, the log mining engine within the database. And it says, OK, I'm now pulling data for those tables and I'm going to send you those table changes. And so as the extract process gets sent those changes, it's going to have checkpoint information. So not only does it know where it was pulling data from out of that source database, but what it's also writing to the trail file. The trail files themselves are all sequential and they have only committed data, as we talked about earlier. The distribution service has checkpoint information that says, hey, I know where I'm reading from in the previous trail file, and I know what I've sent across the network. The receiver service is the same thing. It knows what it's receiving, as well as what it's written to the trail file and the target system. The replicat also has a checkpoint. It knows where it's reading from in the trail file, and then it knows what it's been applying into that target database.  This is where things start to become a little complicated. Our replicat process in most cases are parallel, so it'll have multiple threads applying data into that target database. Each of those threads is applying different transactions. And because of the way that the parallelism works in the replicat process, you can actually get situations where one replicat thread might be applying a transaction higher than another thread. And so you can eliminate that sequential or serial aspect of it, and we can get very high throughput speeds to the replicat. But it means that the checkpoint needs to be kind of smart enough to know how to rebuild itself if something fails. 11:32 Lois: Ok, sorry Nick, but can you go through that again? Maybe we can work backwards this time?  Nick: If the replicat process fails, when it comes back up, it's going to look to its checkpoint tables inside that target database. These checkpoint tables keep track of where each thread was at when it crashed. And so when the replicat process restarts, it goes, oh, I was applying these threads at this location in these SCNs. It'll then go and read from the trail file and say, hey, let me rebuild that data and it only applies transactions that it hasn't applied yet to that target system. There is a synchronized replicat command as well that will tell a crashed replicat to say, hey, bring all your threads up to the same high watermark. It does that process automatically as it restarts and continues normal replication. But there is an option to do it just by itself too. So that's how the replicat kind of repairs and recovers itself. It'll simply look at the trail files. Now, let's say that the replicat crashed, and it goes to read from the trail files when it restarts and that trail profile is missing. It'll actually communicate to the distribution, or excuse me, to the receiver service and say, hey, receiver service, I don't have this trail file. Can you bring it back for me? And the receiver service will communicate downstream and say, hey, distribution service, I need you to resend me trail find number 6. And so the distribution service will resend that trail file so that the replicat can reprocess it. So it's often nice to have redundant environments with GoldenGate so we can have those trail files kind of around for availability. 13:13 Nikita: What if one of these files gets corrupted? Nick: If one of those trail files is corrupt, let's say that a trail file on the target site became corrupt and the replicat can't read from it for one reason or another. Simply stop the replicat process, delete the corrupt trail file, restart the replicat process, and now it's going to rebuild that trail file from scratch based on the information from the source GoldenGate environment. And so it's very recoverable. Handles it all very well. 13:40 Nikita: And can the extract process bounce back in the same way? Nick: The extract process can also recover in a similar way. So if the extract process crashes, when it restarts itself, there's a number of things that it does. The first thing is it has to rebuild any open transactions. So it keeps all sorts of checkpoint information about the oldest transaction that it's keeping track of, any open transactions that haven't been committed, and any other transactions that have been committed that it's already written to the trail file. So as it's reprocessing that data, it knows exactly what it's committed to trail and what hasn't been committed. And there's a number of ways that it does this.  There's two main components here. One of them is called bounded recovery. Bounded recovery will allow you to set a time limit on transactions that span a certain length of time that they'll actually get flushed out to disk on that GoldenGate Hub. And that way it'll reduce the amount of time it takes GoldenGate to restart the extract process. And the other component is cache manager. Cache manager stores uncommitted transactions. And so it's a very elegant way of rebuilding itself from any kind of failure. You can also set up restart profiles so that if any process does crash, the GoldenGate service manager can automatically restart that service an x number of times across y time span. So if I say, hey, if my extract crashes, then attempt to restart it 100 times every 5 seconds. So there's a lot of things that you can do there to make it really nice and automatic repair itself and automatically resilient.  15:18 Lois: Well, that brings us to the end of this episode. Thank you, Nick, for going through the security strategies and recovery processes in such detail. Next week, we’ll look at the installation of GoldenGate. Nikita: And if you want to learn more about the topics we discussed today, head over to mylearn.oracle.com and take a look at the Oracle GoldenGate 23ai Fundamentals course. Until next time, this is Nikita Abraham… Lois: And Lois Houston signing off! 15:44 That’s all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We’d also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

20 Maj 16min