With Oracle’s acquisition of Golden Gate Software in July, yet another integration offering is available. Golden Gate’s strength (and why it garnered Oracle’s attention) lies in its ability to move transactional data between heterogeneous databases with sub-second latency, transaction integrity, and minimal overhead. Although Oracle says Streams will continue to be supported, Golden Gate is the strategic direction for real-time integration.
So for Business Intelligence systems, what does this mean? Historically, data warehouse applications have attempted to answer the question “what happened?”, “why did it happen?” or “what will happen?”. These are reporting, analytical and predictive type applications. However, companies want their data warehouse systems to become part of their operational decision making. They need to answer “what is happening?” — reacting immediately to a change in business. This is where Golden Gate shines. Whereas, Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB) and Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) are better suited for batch-oriented ETL, Golden Gate offers real-time (or near real-time) integration of data and can perform basic transformations. For more advanced transformation needs, Golden Gate can augment ODI allowing Golden Gate to perform the real-time extraction and ODI performing the transformations and loading.
More info on Golden Gate may be found at http://www.oracle.com/goldengate.