GoldenGate, Oracle Corp.’s software for replicating data from one database to another, is being released as a fully managed and automated cloud service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Oracle’s latest move, in what has been a busy 2021 for the enterprise database giant, is geared toward providing simplicity with flexibility in scaling and pay-per-use pricing.

“Traditionally, data integration and replication products, although very powerful, are also very complex to use,” said Juan Loaiza (pictured), executive vice president of mission-critical database technologies at Oracle. “We’ve made it dramatically simpler, not just for super experts, but anyone can use it. We’re making it completely elastically scalable, with pay-per-use and dynamic, real-time scalability. As your workload increases, we automatically increase the throughput of GoldenGate.”

Loaiza spoke with Dave Vellante, host of SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming video studio theCUBE. They discussed meeting enterprise needs for real-time information, expanding the market for data replication solutions, why companies appreciate autonomous and elastic tools in database management, and Oracle’s recent new offering involving the blockchain.

Goal for real-time data

The GoldenGate software technology was acquired by Oracle in 2009. At the time, the company indicated that the software would boost the ability of Oracle customers to make decisions based on timely information from multiple sources.

“That’s the heritage of GoldenGate,” Loaiza said. “Real-time data all over the enterprise is really the goal that everyone wants. That is the key benefit for GoldenGate, and that is the key technology that we’ve been working on. And now we have made it very easy to use in the cloud.”

Oracle views GoldenGate as a key element in providing customers with business continuity through data replication up to six times faster than traditional data movement tools. By extending GoldenGate to the cloud, the company envisions a broader market for the software.

“The big customers have been big users of GoldenGate, but one of the things this does is expands the market, makes it much more dramatically easier for smaller companies that don’t have as many IT resources to use the product,” Loaiza explained. “Traditionally, the price has been high for a small customer. But now with pay-per-use in the cloud, it eliminates the two big blockers for smaller enterprises, which are the high fixed cost and the complexity of the products.”

Autonomous and elastic

Two key features that Oracle is banking on to drive interest in the cloud-based data replication tool are its autonomous capabilities and elasticity.

Earlier this year, Oracle released a string of updates for its Autonomous Data Warehouse offering. Analysts took note of ADW’s role in positioning Oracle for ownership of the entire database stack and the data warehouse’s interoperability with GoldenGate provides further evidence for that.

“We built Extract, Transform and Load or ETL into the Autonomous Data Warehouse, and we’re building our GoldenGate replication into autonomous data warehousing,” Loaiza said. “We built machine learning directly, natively into the database. A big move that we’ve been making is taking it beyond just a database to a full analytic platform.”

The latest GoldenGate offering also is designed to provide elasticity in both data movement and scaling. Data can be moved from or to major cloud providers, according to Loaiza, and the ability to scale based on workload demands may prove attractive for small companies seeking to control costs.

“Normally, in an on-prem configuration, you have to decide the maximum number of workloads that are going to happen,” Loaiza noted. “If you guess wrong, you’re either spending too much because you oversized it or you have a big data, real-time problem. The beauty of elasticity and pay-per-use is you don’t have to figure all of this stuff out. If you have more workload, we grow it automatically.”

Blockchain for distributed apps

In addition to the updates announced for GoldenGate and ADW, Oracle also recently released Database 21c with new features that included a native JSON Datatype and Blockchain Tables, designed to address the complex task of building apps that can support a distributed ledger.

The worlds of blockchain and enterprise data management are coming together, according to Loaiza, as companies focus more intently on distributed multiparty applications to run the business.

“You have multiple parties that all want to reach consensus, and that consensus is stored in a blockchain,” Loaiza said. “We’ve taken the core architecture, a lot of the cryptography of blockchain, and we’ve engineered that natively into the Oracle database. We’re the first company to ever do this.”

Over the past few months, Oracle has shown a dedicated interest in providing as many conceivable data types as possible within a centralized solution designed to remove complexity for its users. This runs the gamut from JSON, relational and spatial, to graph, analytics, blockchain and microservices.

“Our big goal there is to provide what we call a converged database,” Loaiza said. “It’s everything you need, all the data types, built into the database, making it dramatically easier to both develop and deploy new applications. We’ll take on the complexity, so developers and customers find it easier to develop and easier to use.”

Here’s the complete video interview below, one of many CUBE Conversations from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE:

Photo: SiliconANGLE