GoldenGate's Real-Time Data Warehousing solution provides continuous, real-time capture and delivery of the most recent changed data from OLTP systems into the data warehouse.

KEY BENEFITS:

• Real-time data for enabling more advanced, agile business intelligence
• Low-impact, high-performance solution for integrating data and applying business rules
• Does not require batch window outages
• Support for large data volumes and heterogeneity
• Eliminates need for middle-tier ETL servers
• Exceptional flexibility, easy implementation and maintenance
• Strong data recovery and data integrity capabilities

Business and IT Challenges

Gone are the days when Data Warehouses were just for reporting, analytics, and forecasting. Today, more companies are working hard to make their data warehouses operational and active -- and thus more critical to the business. An important requirement is to enable lowest possible latency in which new data is delivered to the data warehouse, ideally in real time.

Why is real-time data so crucial? In order to determine and influence what should happen next, an operational data warehouse needs to know what is happening right now. For example, as it starts to snow in Boston, the operational data warehouse can help monitor snow shovel sales and then provide information to help determine whether the stores should move more merchandise to the shelves and also offer discounted gloves. There is a lot less value in reacting to data for a snowstorm that occurred 24 hours ago -- or even 6 hours ago.

Challenges in Evaluating Real-Time Solutions
There are many data integration technologies that serve the data acquisition needs of a data warehouse, however only a few offer real-time data delivery with sub-second latency. The challenge for the IT group is to determine what solution or combination of solutions will meet their data delivery needs to help propel the move to operational and active data warehousing.

Such evaluations are aided with the understanding of:

• Selection Criteria -- This should include considerations for frequency of data movement, acceptable latency, data quantity/volumes, data integrity, transformation requirements, and processing overhead/impact.
• "Right Time" vs. Real-Time -- When evaluating solutions, the technology should deliver real-time data capabilities and let the user choose the "right time" as a business decision. Right-time should be a component of decision latency (a user preference), not a technical constraint.
• Transformations -- As the data warehouse approaches real time, transformations ideally should take place within the data warehouse where it is more suitable to stage and transform the data in order to reduce data and analysis latency. This eliminates the need for additional IT infrastructure and steps for aggregating changed data on a middle-tier/centralized server until it is batch processed.

GoldenGate for Real-Time Data Warehousing

To enable real-time data acquisition, GoldenGate Software offers a solution that should be evaluated for operational and active data warehousing projects.

GoldenGate's Real-Time Data Warehousing solution provides continuous, real-time capture and delivery of the most recent changed data between OLTP systems and the data warehouse. As soon as new transactional activity is committed at the source system(s), that data is immediately moved to the data warehouse where it can drive enhanced business intelligence capabilities.

In addition, GoldenGate's solution eliminates the need for batch window outages, is extremely low impact, supports the movement of large data volumes, improves the ability to recover data in the event of a failure or outage, and maintains the integrity of data transactions across multiple systems.

GoldenGate provides native transformation support or the ability to call on business rules from third-party/external solutions. Transformations can be applied at the capture or delivery processes, or inside the data warehouse when higher end-to-end performance is desired, but regardless no additional middle-tier server (i.e., ETL server) is needed. However, if existing ETL investments need to be leveraged for heavier transformation requirements, GoldenGate can easily provide Real-Time Change Data Capture for ETL , which gives customers the benefits of eliminating the batch window and reducing overhead when extracting data from sources.

Customers find that GoldenGate is significantly faster and easier to implement and maintain, compared to other data integration solutions such as ETL and EAI. GoldenGate Director provides a GUI-based add-on product for speeding the deployment, monitoring, and reporting on all the GoldenGate process modules supported across the enterprise.

GoldenGate Real-Time Data Warehousing is an excellent, proven solution that is key to enabling operational and active data warehouses.

RESOURCES:

• Data Sheet: GoldenGate for Real-Time Data Warehousing: Download the data sheet (PDF)
• White Paper: Real-Time Data Warehousing for Improved Business Intelligence: Read the abstract and download the PDF
• White Paper: "Knowing Sooner Rather Than Later: Cost Analysis of Low-Latency Data in Enterprise Data Warehousing"
  -- This February 2007 white paper from Bolder Technology Inc. explores the cost factors of acquiring low-latency data from transaction systems into the enterprise data warehouse. It explores five typical architectures for data acquisitions and estimates the cost factors for each. View the detailed abstract | Download the PDF
• Web Seminar: "Real-Time and ETL: When Opposites Attract" recorded on September 26, 2007 to showcase solutions that combine data integration technologies for fresher data and lower IT impact. Play Now