Solace Gets in Sync with Oracle GoldenGate

On Tuesday, we announced a new solution that pairs Solace appliances with Oracle GoldenGate to make the real-time data synchronization across many databases and applications easier and more efficient. This is a solution that has been cooking for a while, and has already been deployed by multiple large customers.  I’ll briefly outline how it works and how it extends GoldenGate’s already powerful feature set.

Oracle GoldenGate is Oracle’s flagship logical data replication product for Oracle and heterogeneous database environments. It enables real-time data integration using log-based change data capture technology to replicate, transform and synchronize information across a wide range of systems including databases, operational and analytic systems. This is commonly used to keep different data sources in sync.

Two Great Technologies – Better Together

Oracle GoldenGate is great at capturing and distributing data events as they occur in the heterogeneous environment. Using a high performance message bus to publish resulting updates to any number of other systems makes it easier to keep information accurate and up to date across an enterprise-scale IT system, providing more opportunities to monetize this valuable corporate asset.

Supporting Real-Time Applications and Analytics

Solace makes it easy to extend Oracle GoldenGate updates to many downstream applications and systems, in addition to other databases. For example, many of our deployed clients synchronize databases with in-memory data grids or send real-time database updates for complex event processing. Others want to stream the latest updates to business intelligence dashboards or client-facing mobile apps. Whatever the use case, a message bus provides a flexible platform for enabling information to flow to a diverse set of end points using whatever networks, communications protocols and qualities of services are available and appropriate.
But all message buses are not created equal. GoldenGate scales far beyond the capacity of many messaging products, which leads to complex and expensive horizontal scaling architectures to get the benefits of a message bus. With Solace, an architect can confidently feed GoldenGate streams directly into the message bus and distribute messages to all the systems where they are needed.

Simplifying Distribution Architectures

The diagram below shows the difference between Oracle GoldenGate’s native architecture which requires discrete connections between GoldenGate components, and a bus-based architecture in which GoldenGate components connect to a Solace appliance which handles all the routing, delivery and fanout from there.

As a full-fledged message bus that enables communications between all kinds of systems over local and wide area networks, Solace can simplify Oracle GoldenGate deployments and accelerate performance in all kinds of environments.

Accelerating Global Information Flow

Here is one example of the kind of performance advantage we bring to the table, as measured by a real customer.

This customer tested the speed of Oracle GoldenGate updates over a transatlantic WAN link with and without Solace. The link was a 155 Mbps link between NY and London with a round trip time of approximately 100 milliseconds. They also measured the effect of packet loss on performance because WAN links are less reliable than LANs and some packet loss is expected. Published data from the WAN suppliers show that 0.1% over a month is not uncommon, and 0.25% packet loss can occur in bursts during periods of congestion.

Solace was shown to improve throughput over Oracle GoldenGate alone by 7 to 18 times. This is because of the well-known “long fat pipe” problem, where it is very difficult for a stop-and-wait protocol such as TCP to fill the available bandwidth over a high latency network. Oracle GoldenGate does remarkably well using native TCP, and even better with Solace appliances which have been engineered to handle the quirks of the WAN. This brief video summarizes the optimizations Solace has embedded into our messaging protocols to overcome these challenges.

Conclusion

We are very pleased to be offering this new solution, and look forward to helping Oracle GoldenGate customers to be more successful than ever with their real-time data synchronization projects. You can read the press release here.