I work with a vendor that does data analytics, and they currently receive a replication stream from some of our databases using a product called Goldengate (which is very expensive). Goldengate has been great – it replicates transactions from the Tandem-NSK source and can apply the changes into any supported database – they're using MySQL at the remote end. We're switching our billing system to Oracle, and while we could continue to use Goldengate to move these logs, I'd like to see if there's another option.
We initially chose Goldengate because nothing else could get data out of the Tandem NSK, but now that we're moving to Oracle, there may be some more native (or at least simpler) choices. I've got nothing against them – like I said, it works great – but I'm hoping that two mainstrem databases are easier to do replication between than the NSK.
Are there any products of methods that would help get transactional data from an Oracle system into an MySQL database? I'm not sure if there's any way to do this kind of replication natively (I know we can do Oracle -> MSSQL using native replication, but not any way to target MySQL that I'm aware of), or if anybody knows of a product that could facilitate this (and costs less than Goldengate).
Thanks for any suggestions!
Best Answer
From your question, it doesn't sound like you need true transactional semantics, and that asynchronous replication would be fine.
If that's the case, it's fairly trivial to build a replication system using triggers within Oracle to track data changes, and then replaying those changes into MySQL, using something like perl (or other scripting languages) as the glue code to talk between both systems using SQL.
This might sound like it would be a lot of overhead, but we've built numerous systems like this for our clients, and the overhead from Oracle's standpoint is pretty low; we've run it on some OLTP systems powering top 1000 websites that had hefty transactional workloads, and Oracle handled it like a champ.