Oracle Goldengate

I always laugh at Oracle’s sale pitch for Oracle Goldengate. The conversation is like this:
We need to implement an ETL process …
Oracle Goldengate is just for that.
We need a long distance disaster recovery solution …
Oracle Goldengate is great for it.
We have RAC but facing downtime for no rolling patching …
Oracle Goldengate is a must.
We need to pull data from other database vendor’s databases for real time BI …
Oracle Goldengate of course.

However, after some research on Oracle Golden gate, I start to like it more. First, it supports replication of a wide range of database vendors from MySQL to DB2. MySQL is quite popular for software development nowadays but few replication products support it. Secondly, it uses transaction logs (redo log for oracle, binLog for MySQL) for Changed Data Capture (CDC) that has performance advantage and no change to the databases involved comparing with other CDC methods, such as trigger based. The third, it has rich set of built-in functions for data transformation and mapping on fly. In conclusion, it may not be the solution for every database problem, but can meet many IT challenges if used properly.