Oracle GoldenGate

Overview

Oracle GoldenGate is the incumbent of real-time replication, positioned as a platform for building data fabrics across heterogeneous environments, available self-managed or as a fully managed cloud service.

Three products need keeping apart, because conflating them is the usual mistake. The classic product you install and licence per processor; GoldenGate for Distributed Applications and Analytics, which is the renamed GoldenGate for Big Data and handles non-database targets; and OCI GoldenGate, the managed service sized in OCPUs.

Capture is redo and transaction log mining through the Extract process, which can run against the source or against a separate downstream mining database on Oracle, keeping the load off production.

Trail files are the architectural signature. Captured changes are written to a series of files on disk, and Replicat reads that trail to rebuild and apply the operations, which is why extraction and delivery run independently and why recovery means rewinding a trail rather than re-snapshotting.

Exactly-once is the design intent, achieved by writing checkpoints inside the Replicat transaction so a transaction applies once even if the process or database fails.

High availability is its historical reason for existing and still the strongest here, with a published maximum availability architecture, RAC and Active Data Guard blueprints, and active-active read and write across regions with conflict detection and resolution.

Veridata is a genuine differentiator, continuously comparing source and target to validate integrity, with no first- party equivalent from Debezium or Qlik.

The current release is 26ai, from January 2026, so anything describing 23ai as current is a release behind. Its headline features are AI, with embedded model providers, vector embeddings inside replication pipelines and an open- source MCP server for agent-driven operations.

Key features and capabilities

The same headings are used for every change data capture & replication entry, so two tools can be read side by side.

How changes are captured

• Redo and transaction log mining through the Extract process
• A downstream Extract can mine from a separate database on Oracle, keeping capture off the production host
• Oracle sources must run in archivelog mode, and Oracle strongly recommends forced logging
• Supplemental logging in 26ai uses a new subset database replication mode, replacing minimum supplemental logging
• Schema-level supplemental logging is required when replicating DDL

Source databases

• Oracle databases across every deployment, from Autonomous and Exadata to Base Database Service
• Non-Oracle databases including SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, SAP HANA, Sybase ASE and Teradata
• Mainframe and midrange through Db2 for z/OS, Db2 for i and HPE NonStop
• Cloud stores including Aurora, RDS, Redshift, BigQuery, Azure SQL, Databricks and Snowflake
• The connectivity list is explicitly a superset; certified pairs and versions live in separate matrix spreadsheets

Targets

• Streaming to Kafka, Amazon MSK, Kinesis, Event Hubs, Confluent, Google Pub/Sub, JMS, OCI Streaming and Solace
• Warehouses through the analytics product, including Redshift, Synapse, Databricks, BigQuery and Snowflake
• Open table formats and lakes including Apache Iceberg, Microsoft Fabric OneLake and S3, with S3 Tables certified
• NoSQL including DocumentDB, Cassandra, DataStax, MongoDB and Oracle NoSQL
• Delta Lake and Apache Hudi are not published as named writers

Delivery and consistency guarantees

• Exactly-once by design, using checkpoint files, a checkpoint table and values inside the trail files
• Checkpoints are written inside the Replicat transaction, so a transaction succeeds or fails as one
• Oracle documents the edge case, that a failure between a write and a checkpoint can replay data on restart
• Data Streams publishes an explicit exactly-once quality-of-service mode that filters duplicates
• Ordering and transaction boundaries are preserved by construction, since the trail is in commit order

Handling schema changes

• DDL replication is enabled in Extract, with include and exclude filters and event actions
• Event actions can report, stop or trigger a response, so a target schema can be reviewed before continuing
• Automatic schema evolution arrived in 26ai but is a preview feature
• Oracle recommends the older event-actions approach as a controlled alternative for production
• Schema registry integration is configured on the Kafka handler in the analytics product

Monitoring and recovery

• Microservices architecture gives a browser interface and a full REST API across five services
• StatsD metrics, improved health checks and Telegraf and AWR integration in 26ai
• Deeper monitoring needs the separately licensed Management Pack, so monitoring is not fully included
• Recovery uses checkpoint files, a checkpoint table and the trail, with trail file management added in 23.4
• The strongest high availability here, with RAC and Active Data Guard blueprints and active-active with conflict resolution

Where it runs and what it costs

• Self-hosted on-premises or on any cloud virtual machine, with an official Docker image
• OCI GoldenGate is the managed service, also running on Oracle Database at Azure and at Google Cloud
• Production deployments default to 4 OCPUs with autoscaling, capped at 24, billed at the maximum consumed
• No Kubernetes operator is published, and no region list appears on the service pages
• Priced per OCPU-hour in the cloud, or per processor or named user perpetually

Pricing

Perpetual licence$1.3441 an OCPU-hour, or $17,500 a processor

The only one here that is not quote-only. OCI GoldenGate is $1.3441 per OCPU-hour, or $0.3226 bring-your-own-licence, so the 4-OCPU production default is about $3,925 a month before infrastructure. Perpetual list prices are published too: $17,500 a processor for the core product, $20,000 for the analytics edition, $30,000 for Veridata, $100,000 for mainframe and $3,500 for the management pack, each with annual support at 22%. Licences count the source and target database endpoints, not the GoldenGate host. A free edition covers databases up to 20 GB with no support.

Vendor pricing page →

Demos and videos

• Oracle GoldenGate 26ai, an in-depth look Webinar or talk · YouTube
• Get started with Oracle GoldenGate Free Tutorial · YouTube

About Oracle

GoldenGate is an Oracle Corporation product, and Oracle is the only publicly traded steward in this category, founded in 1977 with around 141,000 employees and originally listed on NASDAQ as ORCL. Oracle acquired GoldenGate Software in 2009, though that is stated first-party mostly by Striim, founded by the same team, rather than restated on Oracle's current product pages. It is licensed as a family of separate proprietary programs, from the core product through Veridata, the mainframe edition and the management pack, each with its own price line, plus a free edition limited to databases of 20 GB or less.

Founded 1977 · oracle.com