Oracle GoldenGate is a product that covers many use cases in the business of data replication. It is not only useful for classical distributed databases, it is also useful for High Availability Architectures and especially for Data Warehouse and Decision Support Systems. Thus, the variety of techniques and methods spreads from unidirectional environments for query offloading/reporting to bidirectional or Peer-to-Peer architectures in an active-active fashion. Besides this, Oracle GoldenGate is not only available for heterogeneous Oracle-to-Oracle databases, but it also scales in heterogeneous non Oracle database environments which is also one topic in the Data Warehouse business. The flexibility of the product is amazing and the functionality manages a wide spectrum such as filtering, performing transformations, event handling, and many other options.

I am happy that John Jeffries summarized the main topics of Oracle Golden Gate in this book. Both parts, configuration & implementation as well as monitoring and performance tuning/troubleshooting, is described for developers and administrators. The book does start from a common architectural overview, shows up standard implementation steps, and explains how to manage the distributed environment.

John Jeffries has been an expert of Oracle databases for years. Besides the knowledge of distributed databases, his skills cover a wide area of the Oracle core technology. So, he is not only able to discuss the topics individually, but he also puts the individual pieces together that rounds up the overall common architecture. This work is very valuable as it is raised from a fundamental practical experience.

Volker Kuhr

Oracle Advanced Customer Support (ACS)

Team Leader for Distributed Databases