Oracle today made its GoldenGate technology available as a fully managed data fabric platform on its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), which it boldly calls “the first cloud service to overcome the biggest obstacles IT organizations face when migrating their mission-critical databases to the cloud.” 

The new OCI-native GoldenGate service supports automated data integration, change data capture, delivery, and real-time transaction replication to simplify on-premises to cloud integrations, multi-region data synchronization, data pipelines, and multi-cloud database replication. It provides a distributed transaction ledger to make operational data available across locations and processes data streams to allow that data to be analyzed and acted on while in motion and in-memory, Jeff Pollock, Oracle’s VP product management, explained. 

In other words, this web-based OCI console application aims to take the heavy lifting out of migration, modernization, and transformation. 

Customers can also use it to continuously stream data into data lakes, transform data in streaming pipelines, perform time-series analytics on streaming data, and provide alerts on real-time data events.

Oracle acquired GoldenGate in 2009. It has since provided operational and analytic data integration services to thousands of customers worldwide, including 84% of Fortune Global 100 companies for over a decade, Pollock explained. In 2018 Oracle shifted GoldenGate to a decentralized microservices architecture to make it a real-time platform designed to help customers break out of legacy batch processing.  

At its core, OCI GoldenGate is a shift from traditional centralized monolithic architectures. “The days are gone when a centralized batch-oriented data hub solved real-world pain points,” Pollock said. “Everyone is leveraging the cloud now in some form.”

The platform uses a data mesh architecture approach that essentially provides the agility of a service mesh to create a data-centric version of microservices. Instead of flowing the data from domains into a centrally owned data lake or platform, the idea is to rearchitect domains to host and serve their domain datasets in a consumable way.

Oracle contends that its GoldenGate technology stands alone in the market despite Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure each having a hand in the pot. AWS in particular, Pollock pointed out, does not have a managed service equivalent to OCI GoldenGate. The closest AWS has is Glue, which only works in AWS Cloud and does not work from on-premises to the cloud or back. “It is a tool, not a managed service,” he added.