Heterogeneous environments

Although not heavily discussed in this book, one of the main features of GoldenGate is its support for heterogeneous databases. GoldenGate's decoupled architecture, plus its trail file universal data format, enables heterogeneity. This is a main selling feature for Oracle, as GoldenGate does not require additional gateways or conversion software in order to extract and replicate data across environments.

DEFGEN is an essential step in the GoldenGate configuration of heterogeneous environments. It provides the source definitions for the Replicat process to lookup. Without these, GoldenGate cannot replicate data between non-identical tables.

Specific options

So what specific configuration options are available to non-Oracle databases?

To help answer that question, the following paragraphs describe the options available to the most common alternative database types.

Microsoft SQL Server

GoldenGate has the ability to capture data from native SQL Server backups, not just...