GoldenGate 23ai: Terminology & Architecture

05/13/25 • 18 min

In this episode, Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Nick Wagner, focus on GoldenGate’s terminology and architectural evolution. Nick defines source and target systems, which are crucial for data replication, and then moves on to explain the data extraction and replication processes. He also talks about the new microservices architecture, which replaces the classic architecture, offering benefits like simplified management, enhanced security, and a user-friendly interface. Nick highlights how this architecture facilitates easy upgrades and provides a streamlined experience for administrators. Oracle GoldenGate 23ai: Fundamentals: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-goldengate-23ai-fundamentals/145884/237273 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. --------------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript:

00:00

Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started!

00:25

Nikita: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I’m Nikita Abraham, Team Lead of Editorial Services with Oracle University, and with me is Lois Houston: Director of Innovation Programs.

Lois: Hi there! Thanks for joining us again as we make our way through Oracle GoldenGate 23ai. Last week, we discussed all the new features introduced in 23ai and today, we’ll move on to the terminology, the different processes and what they do, and the architecture of the product at a high level.

00:56

Nikita: Back with us is Nick Wagner, Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle GoldenGate. Hi Nick! Let’s get into some of the terminology. What do we actually call stuff in GoldenGate?

Nick: Within GoldenGate, we have our source systems and our target systems. The source is where we're going to be capturing data from, the targets, where we're going to be applying data into.

And when we start talking about things like active-active or setting up GoldenGate for high availability, where your source can also be your target, it does become a little bit more complex. And so in some of those cases, we might refer to things as East and West, or America and Europe, or different versions of that.

We also have a couple of different things within the product itself. We have what we call our Extract and our Replicat. The Extract is going to be the process that pulls the data out of the database, our capture technology. Our Replicat’s going to be the one that applies the data into the target system, or you can also look at it as a push technology.

We have what we call our Distribution Path. Our Distribution Path is going to be how we're sending the data across the network. A lot of times when customers run GoldenGate, they don't have the luxury of just having a single server of GoldenGate that can pull data from one database and push data into another one. They need to set up multiple hops of that data. And so in that case, we would use what we call a Distribution Path to send that data from one system to the next.

We also have what we call a Target Initiated Path. It's kind of a subset of your Distribution Path, but it allows you to communicate from a less secure environment into a more secure environment.

02:33

Lois: Nick, what about parameter names. I’ve seen them in uppercase...title case...does that matter?

Nick: GoldenGate has a lot of parameters. This is something you'll see all over the place within GoldenGate itself.

These parameters are in your Extract and Replicat parameter files during your distribution path parameter files. Parameters for GoldenGate are case insensitive.

Within your own environments, you can set it up to have lowercase, mixed case, whatever you want, but just be aware that they are case insensitive. GoldenGate doesn't care, it's just for readability.

And then we also have something called trail files. Trail files is where GoldenGate stores all the data before we're able to apply it into that target system. Think about it as our queuing mechanism, and we're queuing everything outsid...

00:00

00:25

Nikita: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I’m Nikita Abraham, Team Lead of Editorial Services with Oracle University, and with me is Lois Houston: Director of Innovation Programs.

00:56

Nikita: Back with us is Nick Wagner, Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle GoldenGate. Hi Nick! Let’s get into some of the terminology. What do we actually call stuff in GoldenGate?

Nick: Within GoldenGate, we have our source systems and our target systems. The source is where we're going to be capturing data from, the targets, where we're going to be applying data into.

We also have what we call a Target Initiated Path. It's kind of a subset of your Distribution Path, but it allows you to communicate from a less secure environment into a more secure environment.

02:33

Lois: Nick, what about parameter names. I’ve seen them in uppercase...title case...does that matter?

Nick: GoldenGate has a lot of parameters. This is something you'll see all over the place within GoldenGate itself.

These parameters are in your Extract and Replicat parameter files during your distribution path parameter files. Parameters for GoldenGate are case insensitive.

Within your own environments, you can set it up to have lowercase, mixed case, whatever you want, but just be aware that they are case insensitive. GoldenGate doesn't care, it's just for readability.

Previous Episode

Oracle GoldenGate 23ai: New Features & Product Family

In this episode, Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham continue their deep dive into Oracle GoldenGate 23ai, focusing on its evolution and the extensive features it offers. They are joined once again by Nick Wagner, who provides valuable insights into the product's journey. Nick talks about the various iterations of Oracle GoldenGate, highlighting the significant advancements from version 12c to the latest 23ai release. The discussion then shifts to the extensive new features in 23ai, including AI-related capabilities, UI enhancements, and database function integration. Oracle GoldenGate 23ai: Fundamentals: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-goldengate-23ai-fundamentals/145884/237273 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript:

00:00

00:25

Lois: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I’m Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Team Lead: Editorial Services.

Nikita: Hi everyone! Last week, we introduced Oracle GoldenGate and its capabilities, and also spoke about GoldenGate 23ai. In today’s episode, we’ll talk about the various iterations of Oracle GoldenGate since its inception. And we’ll also take a look at some new features and the Oracle GoldenGate product family.

00:57

Lois: And we have Nick Wagner back with us. Nick is a Senior Director of Product Management for GoldenGate at Oracle. Hi Nick! I think the last time we had an Oracle University course was when Oracle GoldenGate 12c was out. I’m sure there’s been a lot of advancements since then. Can you walk us through those?

Nick: GoldenGate 12.3 introduced the microservices architecture. GoldenGate 18c introduced support for Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse and Autonomous Transaction Processing Databases.

In GoldenGate 19c, we added the ability to do cross endian remote capture for Oracle, making it easier to set up the GoldenGate OCI service to capture from environments like Solaris, Spark, and HP-UX and replicate into the Cloud. Also, GoldenGate 19c introduced a simpler process for upgrades and installation of GoldenGate where we released something called a unified build. This means that when you install GoldenGate for a particular database, you don't need to worry about the database version when you install GoldenGate. Prior to this, you would have to install a version-specific and database-specific version of GoldenGate. So this really simplified that whole process. In GoldenGate 23ai, which is where we are now, this really is a huge release.

02:16

Nikita: Yeah, we covered some of the distributed AI features and high availability environments in our last episode. But can you give us an overview of everything that’s in the 23ai release? I know there’s a lot to get into but maybe you could highlight just the major ones?

Nick: Within the AI and streaming environments, we've got interoperability for database vector types, heterogeneous capture and apply as well. Again, this is not just replication between Oracle-to-Oracle vector or Postgres to Postgres vector, it is heterogeneous just like the rest of GoldenGate.

The entire UI has been redesigned and optimized for high speed. And so we have a lot of customers that have dozens and dozens of extracts and replicats and processes running and it was taking a long time for the UI to refresh those and to show what's going on within those systems. So the UI has been optimized to be able to handle those environments much better.

We now have the ability to call database functions directly from call map. And so when you do transformation with GoldenGate, we have about 50 or 60 built-in transformation routines for string conversion, arithmetic operation, date manipulation. But we never had the ability to directly call a database function.

03:28

Lois: And now we do?

Nick: So now you can actually call th...

Next Episode

Oracle GoldenGate 23ai Security Strategies

GoldenGate 23ai takes security seriously, and this episode unpacks everything you need to know. GoldenGate expert Nick Wagner breaks down how authentication, access roles, and encryption protect your data. Learn how GoldenGate integrates with identity providers, secures communication, and keeps passwords out of storage. Understand how trail files work, why they only store committed data, and how recovery processes prevent data loss. Whether you manage replication or just want to tighten security, this episode gives you the details to lock things down without slowing operations. Oracle GoldenGate 23ai: Fundamentals: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-goldengate-23ai-fundamentals/145884/237273 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. -------------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript:

00:00

00:25

Lois: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I’m Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Team Lead: Editorial Services.

Nikita: Welcome, everyone! This is our fourth episode on Oracle GoldenGate 23ai. Last week, we discussed the terminology, different processes and what they do, and the architecture of the product at a high level. Today, we have Nick Wagner back with us to talk about the security strategies of GoldenGate.

00:56

Lois: As you know by now, Nick is a Senior Director of Product Management for GoldenGate at Oracle. He’s played a key role as one of the product designers behind the latest version of GoldenGate. Hi Nick! Thank you for joining us again. Can you tell us how GoldenGate takes care of data security?

Nick: So GoldenGate authentication and authorization is done in a couple of different ways. First, we have user credentials for GoldenGate for not only the source and target databases, but also for GoldenGate itself. We have integration with third-party identity management products, and everything that GoldenGate does can be secured.

01:32

Nikita: And we must have some access roles, right?

Nick: There's four roles built into the GoldenGate product. You have your security role, administrator, operator, and user. They're all hierarchical. The most important one is the security user. This user is going to be the one that provides the administrative tasks.

This user is able to actually create additional users and assign roles within the product. So do not lose this password and this user is extremely important. You probably don't want to use this security user as your everyday user. That would be your administrator.

The administrator role is able to perform all administrative tasks within GoldenGate. So not only can they go in and create new extracts, create new replicats, create new distribution services, but they can also start and stop them. And that's where the operator role is and the user role.

So the operator role allows you to go in and start/stop processes, but you can't create any new ones, which is kind of important. So this user would be the one that could go in and suspend activity. They could restart activity. But they can't actually add objects to replication.

The user role is really a read-only role. They can come in. They can see what's going on. They can look at the log files. They can look at the alerts. They can look at all the watches and see exactly what GoldenGate is doing. But they're unable to make any changes to the product itself.

02:54

Lois: You mentioned the roles are hierarchical in nature. What does that mean?

Nick: So anything that the user role does can be done by the operator. Anything that the operator and user roles can do can be done by the administrator. And anything that the user, operator, and administrator roles do can be done by the security role.

03:11

Lois: Ok. So, is there a single sign-on available for GoldenGate?

Nick: We also have a password plugin for GoldenGate ...