Interview with Sami Akbay, GoldenGate

In this interview we focus on the data integration and data migration technology solutions provider - GoldenGate

We chat with their director Sami Akbay to discuss their history, what they currently offer for the data migration industry and what the future holds for this San Francisco based organisation.

Can you provide a brief background of GoldenGate?

Founded in 1995, original focus area was for high availability of mission-critical systems such as those in hospitals, banking’s ATM systems, and major retailers.

The company then moved over to more solutions for applications which were becoming mission-critical. Web-enabling in particular became prevalent with 24x7x365 requirements that demanded real-time integration and migration operations.

We started partnering with other vendors to provide migrations from older applications to newer versions, and also realised that a lot of maintenance and system-level migrations were increasingly important.

As many business applications gradually evolved into a mission-critical market, the demand for the technological benefits of GoldenGate increased.
We now live in an online world and mission critical is everywhere, so GoldenGate is perfectly placed to help organisations deal with the challenges of migrating data in this environment.

Describe the difference between GoldenGate technology and the more traditional data migration/integration solutions?

Many companies use scripts or ETL tools, and from a technology perspective this means downtime.
These approaches are disruptive and higher risk because you have to switchover the whole system typically in a tight timeframe.
GoldenGate provides zero downtime migrations which are different because they allow you to fallback without losing data and doing the migration without service disruption.

Our approach means that migrations can happens over a period of time, enabling people to take a phased, low-risk approach.

You state that GoldenGate enables “real-time, continuous movement of transactional data”. What do you mean by transactional data management in the context of data migration?

Transactional data migration guarantees the capture, routing, transformation, delivery and verification of complete data transactions across source and target environments. It ensures the integrity of the data at a transaction level.

One of the things we hear from our customers is how important it is that they don’t corrupt or lose any portion of their transactional data during these massive migrations, because that leads to major business risks, and that’s where we excel.

For example, if I go to Amazon, change my address and then order a book, these entire transactions will be migrated in-sync and with accuracy. The referential integrity is maintained as the transaction is migrated.

What are the different migration scenarios GoldenGate can support?

There are three primary scenarios, depending on how much downtime they can tolerate. First is a unidirectional migration. This is akin to traditional data migrations where there is a “big-bang” cutover with no failback. The advantage GoldenGate brings here is that we keep the target data at near-zero lag of the data in the legacy system, and we ensure the transactional data integrity in the new system. So when you do cut over, the most current data is already there.

Next is unidirectional with failback. Similar to the first option in that a big-bang migration occurs but in this migration, let’s say an event occurs that makes the new environment you just migrated to un-usable for the time being. This gives the business the ability to fall back to the previous legacy environment to support business operations for the time being while you remedy the problem. The benefit of GoldenGate is that any data changes made in that newly migrated system prior to the problem can be copied back to the legacy environment to ensure that the legacy environment has not lost information during the migration.

Finally is the ultimate in continuous operations for those truly critical apps - bidirectional migration. This lowest-risk migration option allows a phased approach where there is a gradual cutover between two active systems. Users can be switched back and forth on a prescribed schedule as data is migrated. This is because GoldenGate is making sure that data changes made on either environment are synchronised in real-time between the two systems, so there is no data loss and both can actively support business processes while users are phased from the old system to the new one.

Your latency figures for migrating data between environments are extremely low – how is this possible given the large volumes the technology can migrate?

Firstly, the company started with this objective in mind with large point of sale and ATM networks, so our technology expertise has been built upon that over the years.

Secondly, the technology is lightweight because it reads all the operations from system logfiles so they don’t put an excessive load on the system.
This low footprint on the system means we don’t need system downtimes or extended windows of opportunity to migrate or synchronise data, we can do this during live operations. We can also configure the product to scale up for larger volumes, it’s incredibly flexible - we have to be to meet our customers’ needs.

To maintain synchronisation, do you rely on CDC (Change Data Capture)?

Yes, we have developed CDC technology but our approach is quite different to the CDC witnessed in some of the ETL solutions on the market because we are transactional.

With the GoldenGate option, customers can failback, with ETL you can’t.

Imagine the previous Amazon transaction scenario. ETL tools would scan all the addresses that changed and all the orders that changed then move them without maintaining the transaction sequence. This is a very basic form of CDC.

GoldenGate instead migrates the entire “in-flight” transaction to ensure that the sequencing and referential integrity of the data is maintained.

You provide a data validation tool – Veridata, what type of function does this provide within a migration project?

GoldenGate Veridata gives you even more capability in reducing risk to the business during your migration. Veridata lets you quickly identify any and all data discrepancies between those two databases, which can be caused by a long list of possible reasons particularly in a migration project.

It does that by comparing the data to find out-of-sync conditions and producing a report of its findings. And you don’t need to take the systems down to do this - they can be actively running and we even have a way to account for in-flight transactions.

You would run Veridata before the switchover so that you can learn of any issues before you flip the switch and then take action to fix them. Also if you maintain a backup or failback for your new system, which we recommend, you can continue to run Veridata periodically as part of your DR plan.  

What is a typical migration need for GoldenGate customers?

This generally falls into one of four categories:

• Their hardware or operating system is no longer supported or nearing “end-of-life”
• Their application version is no longer supported
• They are consolidating their data centre or implementing virtualization
• They are changing vendor or strategy, for example a switch from Sun to IBM or mainframe to HP-UX

Do you venture into other data migration areas such (eg. Mainframe to modern RDBMS).

We can perform this type of migration but in our experience these are very rare. We typically don’t get involved with this form of migration other than to cope with the synchronisation.

Our focus is not on the traditional, ETL style migrations.

In terms of market growth – where is your focus?

Our geographical markets are certainly growing.

In the first few years we developed markets primarily with the support of partners but in the last 4 or 5 years we have been building out a direct EU presence.

We have offices in Amsterdam, Paris and Dusseldorf and are just about to open an office in London. We also have an office in Singapore and are looking to open new offices in Asia.

In recent times our EMEA presence has grown twice as fast as the US presence.

In terms of verticals we have had considerable success in eBusiness, retail, travel and hospitality, banking and financial services, and healthcare as these suit our core proposition – these businesses don’t like disruption.

We are also focusing on specific application migrations, Oracle Siebel CRM being one where we have recently been validated. We are also working with a number of software as a service (SaaS) vendors because their service level agreements to their own customers dictate that they have high availability.

Where can our members go to find out more about data migration with GoldenGate?

We have a number of great resources on our website, including white papers, data sheets, customer success stories, and archived web seminars.

Bloor Research has also recently issued several reports on the Data Migrations space that discuss GoldenGate’s capabilities:
http://www.goldengate.com/resources/datamigrations-bloor.html

The best place is on our website at http://www.goldengate.com under our Resources section.