GoldenGate 9.5 Boosts Data Management

• By Kurt Mackie
• 11/26/07

San Francisco-based GoldenGate Software is offering a new version of its database optimization and solution. Version 9.5 adds improvements to the company's Transactional Data Management solution. It's typically used by enterprises that want high-availability data or disaster assurance protection. The solution also lets users move data across different databases in real time, according to company literature.

Version 9.5 includes expanded data integration support for customized and standard commercial applications. It supports SAP solutions, as well as Oracle solutions (including E-Business Suite, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft Enterprise and Siebel).

The new version also boosts database support for Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and 2005, Sybase and HP SQL/MX. GoldenGate has partnerships with nearly all of the major database vendors, according to Sami Akbay, GoldenGate's vice president of management and marketing.

The solution can handle non-data objects in Oracle Database 9i an 10g. This aspect of GoldenGate's upgrade will be of particular interest to developers, Akbay said.

"The 9.5 release has certain things that are interesting for the application side," he said. "One of them is support for non-data objects, which allows for using this technology in applications where database schemas change dynamically. So, if the application creates or removes database objects in a new table, temp table, in a PL/SQL-type non-data content database, now you have the ability to propagate that across multiple systems, which allows it to support additional packaged applications."

In addition to the new version's support for Microsoft and HP databases, GoldenGate plans to come out with version that will support Ingress databases, Akbay added.

GoldenGate currently has 4,000 deployments with more than 400 customers, Akbay said. It has a sizeable footprint in finance and a large deployment base in healthcare. Telcos represent an up-and-coming area of support for GoldenGate because of their high-volume business. GoldenGate also works with retail industries that depend on real-time data access.

Continuous availability is the No. 1 problem typically solved using GoldenGate's solution. While people think of that as a disaster recovery function, Akbay said that planned outages can cost more than the unplanned ones.

"There's a hard cost associated with not being available at any given time, which is why people are moving toward eliminating those planned outages as well, and that's an area where GoldenGate is involved," he said.

Data migration from one silo to another is another important area for GoldenGate. The two systems don't have to be identical. As long as you have the same data content, even with different schemas, the mapping and transformations can be done from an older application to a newer one. GoldenGate's solution allows enterprises to move from one application version to another and the two systems can be kept in synch bidirectionally.

"The whole thing happens with subsecond latency," Akbay explained. "If you have any failure, you can roll back to the other system."

GoldenGate's solution works regardless of the underlying hardware platforms. The company focuses on relational databases but if XML is stored in a relational database, GoldenGate's solutions can handle it, Akbay said.

GoldenGate version 9.5 is currently available from the company as a packaged solution.