Use Oracle GoldenGate with Amazon RDS for Oracle Database

Many organizations face the need to move transactional data from one location to another location. As organizations continue to make
the cloud a central part of their overall IT architecture, this need seems to grow in tandem with the size, scope, and complexity of the organization. The application use cases range from migrating data from a master transactional database to a readable secondary database, or moving applications from on-premises to the cloud, or having a redundant copy in another data center location. Transactions that are generated and stored within a database run by one application may need to be copied over so that it can be processed, analyzed, and aggregated in a central location.

In many cases, one part of the organization has moved to a cloud-based data storage model that’s powered by the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). With support for the four most popular relational databases (Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, and PostgreSQL), RDS has been adopted by organizations of all shapes and sizes. Users of Amazon RDS love the fact that it takes care of many important yet tedious deployment, maintenance, and backup tasks that are traditionally part and parcel of an on-premises database.

Oracle GoldenGate
Today we are giving RDS Oracle customers the ability to use Oracle GoldenGate with Amazon RDS. Your RDS Oracle Database Instances can be used as the source or the target of GoldenGate-powered replication operations.

Oracle GoldenGate can collect, replicate, and manage transactional data between a pair of Oracle databases. These databases can be hosted on-premises or in the AWS cloud. If both databases are in the AWS cloud, they can be in the same Region or in different Regions. The cloud-based databases can be RDS DB Instances or Amazon EC2 Instances that are running a supported version of Oracle Database. In other words, you have a lot of flexibility! Here are four example scenarios:

1. On-premises database to RDS DB Instance.
2. RDS DB Instance to RDS DB Instance.
3. EC2-hosted database  to RDS DB Instance.
4. Cross-region replication from one RDS DB Instance to another RDS DB Instance.

You can also use GoldenGate for Amazon RDS to upgrade to a new major version of Oracle.

Getting Started
As you can see from the scenarios listed above, you will need to run the GoldenGate Hub on an EC2 Instance. This instance must have sufficient processing power, storage, and RAM to handle the anticipated transaction volume. Supplemental logging must be enabled for the source database and it must retain archived redo logs. The source and target database need user accounts for the GoldenGate user, along with a very specific set of privileges.

After everything has been configured, you will use the Extract and Replicat utilities provided by Oracle GoldenGate.

The Amazon RDS User Guide contains the information that you will need to have in order to install and configure the hub and to run the utilities.

— Jeff;