“How can I cook when they’ve taken my kitchen away?”
Like the man in the photo, you may have to ask yourself that question now that Oracle Streams has been deprecated. If you depended on Oracle Streams for moving data in your database environment, then you’ll have to work out something else from now on. Like the man in the photo, they’ve taken away your kitchen and you’ll have to make do.
But that’s not a solution for the long haul. What will this man do on big holidays when he needs to entertain a houseful of guests? He’s going to need a real replacement for his kitchen. What will you do for future versions of Oracle? You’ll need to replace Oracle Streams if you hope to keep up with technology updates and use data replication for your upgrades and migrations.
Must-haves for replacing Oracle Streams
The best technology from Streams has been integrated into GoldenGate, which is Oracle’s strategic replication solution.
Oracle Streams was free and GoldenGate isn’t – it’s rather pricey – so that’s the first drag. The second is that GoldenGate may not include all the data replication features you want. Keep your eye out for these three must-haves as you shop for your replacement for Oracle Streams:
Independence: Look for a product that operates outside the production environment – unlike Streams, which is embedded. That way, the process of collecting and transmitting data from the source database to the target has minimal impact on the performance of your database and applications. Not only can DBAs minimize risk due to a failure during data sharing, but the process itself won’t affect resources for transactions on production databases.
Reliability: Oracle Streams processes data sharing from within the database, which means that the function is inherently subject to the flow in the production environment. If there is an error in the database or the database is inaccessible for a moment, the transfer will pause, resulting in latency. Look for the automatic ability to manage and recover from interruptions caused by network or system outages.
Flexibility: You shouldn’t need to depend on a particular operating system, database version or database edition, and neither should your data replication product. Otherwise, you’ll have problems sharing data among heterogeneous systems. The product should also be flexible enough so that you can independently upgrade both source and target databases through the processes of data replication and data sharing. That’s your ticket to easier migrations and upgrades.
Tech brief: Meeting Your Data-Sharing Needs Now that Oracle Streams Is Deprecated
They’ve taken your kitchen away, but that doesn’t mean that you need to make do. Start planning your transition from Oracle Streams by building out your own list of must-haves. Download our tech brief, Meeting Your Data-Sharing Needs Now that Oracle Streams Is Deprecated, for a step-by-step method toward SharePlex, the golden alternative for your Oracle migrations and upgrades.
