Oracle Completes DB2/400 Support in Data Replication Tool
September 11, 2012 Alex Woodie
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Oracle last week unveiled GoldenGate 11g Release 2, a new release of its real time data integration tool, which is commonly used to load large amounts of data, often for business intelligence or disaster recovery purposes. The new release adds support for data capture from DB2/400, which may be useful for organizations looking to move data contained in their IBM i applications to other IBM i servers or other platforms. The product already could load data into DB2/400. GoldenGate is a high speed data integration and replication tool that Oracle acquired in 2009. The tool is based on changed data capture (CDC) technology that keeps the freshest pieces of data flowing from a production database into a secondary database for the purposes of feeding data warehouses, operational reporting, continuous availability, or maintaining production systems in parallel during upgrades or migrations. The software uses a log-based data capture method that Oracle claims minimizes the impact on the source database, while maintaining integrity of the data and delivering sub-second latency across multiple platforms. Soon after acquiring GoldenGate, Oracle released 11g in September 2010, which added support for DB2/400. However, that release only supported the loading of data into DB2/400 from other applications or databases; it couldn’t use DB2/400 as a source of data. It would be nice to think that there’s a big demand for moving data into DB2/400, but the reality is there is a greater demand for moving DB2/400 data to other databases, most often for analytic workloads. (The IBM i server is, wrongly, considered by many to be poor choice for BI and analytic workloads, but that is another story.) Oracle remedied the lack of support for using DB2/400 as a source with GoldenGate 11g Release 2. Customers can now use the software to move the latest transactions recorded by their IBM i applications into their Windows- or Unix-based data warehouses, for instance. Or it could be used to enable real-time replication of data between two separate IBM i servers, for the purpose of DR preparedness, system upgrades, or migrations. (Two-way data replication gives Oracle the basic plumbing on which to build an IBM i high availability solution, but it seems doubtful that it wants to be in that business.) GoldenGate 11g Release brings several other features, including support for delivering data into Postgres database; new data types supported in SQL Server, MySQL, and Sybase databases; support for multi-byte DDL in Teradata environments; better initial load performance in z/OS environments; a new “integrated” capture within the Oracle 11g database; and support for the capture and delivery of compressed objects within Oracle 11g and Oracle Exadata environments. Other 11g Release 2 features include Federal Information Protection Standard (FIPS) support; multi-byte enhancements for supporting Asian operations; new automatic conflict detection and resolution capabilities; and the capability to manage the software through a plug-in for the Oracle Enterprise Manager. RELATED STORY Oracle Adds DB2/400 Support to GoldenGate Data Integration Tool
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