Oracle MAA (Maximum Availability Architecture is Oracle’s best practices blueprint based on proven Oracle high availability technologies, expert recommendations and customer experiences. The goal of MAA is to achieve optimal high availability for Oracle customers at the lowest cost and complexity.
RAC, DataGuard, Flashback, ASM, RMAN, GoldenGate are tools that are part of MAA architecture.
The configuration of Oracle GoldenGate / Data Guard has the purpose of synchronizing data between two or more systems .
The basic features of the two products may look similar but takes GoldenGate uses replication while dataguard not.
Oracle Data Guard and GoldenGate involving at least two systems where transactional data from one database is required to be moved to another database. The purpose of the replication of data can be disaster recovery, migration of data or preparation of a secondary system.
Data Guard is best for disaster recovery and data protection problems, GoldenGate is a more flexible heterogeneous replication mechanism and is also able to transform the data while it is being replicated.
Data Guard is an Oracle specific technology while GoldenGate support heterogeneous database systems including all the major RDBMS as DB2,Sybase, MySql .
Data Guard supports active-passive replication. One of the database is the primary database and the other one is in an inactive Data Guard mode.
GoldenGate supports an active-active replication mode and allows both systems to work simultaneously while maintaining the data integrity.
GoldenGate allows transformation of the data, with conflict management while it is being replicated between both database systems.
GoldenGate allows replication across platform. Data can be extracted from a Unix platform and replicated to an Oracle database running on platform Windows.
GoldenGate has many case of utilization. The use of flat files for data transportation and the support of heterogeneous systems makes the technology so very interesting
Oracle Database 12c provides several tools to improve the availability and reliability of your critical databases. the difference between Oracle GoldenGate and Oracle Data Guard. Here is my shot about explaining the core differences.
Data Guard As blocks are changed in the database records are added to the redo log. Depending on the mode that you are running these log records will either be immediately copied to the standby or deferred. These are all changes to the database. Since they are log records and block data they are very quickly applied to the standby system. In the event of a failover to the standby recovery can occur very fast. Oracle has put decades of effort into optimizing the recovery process. All non-committed transactions are rolled-back, all committed transactions are rolled-forward. Recovery can happen in a matter of seconds.
GoldenGate works in a completely different mode. The GoldenGate extract process mines the redo log, keeping transactional changes in memory until a commit record has been processed. It then builds its own transactions into the trail file based on primary key. This can sometimes take time.
GoldenGate is awesome for replication, especially lots of small transactions, but can be challenged by very large transactions. The recovery time for a “failover” can be significant compared to Data Guard. In addition, whereas you can configure Data Guard to work synchronously, GoldenGate only replicates changes after the transaction is committed, so if you have a long running transaction it can take a while to replicate.
I am a huge fan of GoldenGate, but if you are purely looking for synchronous DR then Data Guard is the best solution.
If you are looking to do any of the following the GoldenGate is the best solution:
Replicate one or many tables to a read-write database.
Replicate and transform tables.
Bi-directional replication.
Zero or near-zero downtime upgrade.
Heterogeneous replication