This chapter contains the requirements for the system and database resources that support Oracle GoldenGate. This chapter contains the following sections:
Section 1.1, "Overview of Oracle GoldenGate for Oracle TimesTen"
Section 1.2, "Verifying Certification and System Requirements"
Oracle GoldenGate for Oracle TimesTen supports the delivery of data from other types of databases to a TimesTen database.
High-speed Oracle GoldenGate replication can be used to refresh a TimesTen cache environment with minimal latency. In addition, with its heterogeneous support, Oracle GoldenGate enables the TimesTen data store to be used as a data integration point for other data sources.
Oracle GoldenGate supports the mapping, filtering, and manipulation of data from other sources to the TimesTen database. Oracle GoldenGate does not support the extraction of data from TimesTen to other TimesTen data stores or to other kinds of databases.
Make sure that you are installing your product on a supported hardware or software configuration. For more information, see the certification document for your release on the Oracle Fusion Middleware Supported System Configurations page.
Oracle has tested and verified the performance of your product on all certified systems and environments; whenever new certifications occur, they are added to the proper certification document right away. New certifications can occur at any time, and for this reason the certification documents are kept outside of the documentation libraries and are available on Oracle Technology Network.
This section describes the operating system requirements for running Oracle GoldenGate for Oracle TimesTen.
At least a dual-core central processing unit is required. A quad-core processor is preferred.
The amount of memory that is required for Oracle GoldenGate depends on the amount of data being processed, the number of Oracle GoldenGate processes running, the amount of RAM available to Oracle GoldenGate, and the amount of disk space that is available to Oracle GoldenGate for storing pages of RAM temporarily on disk when the operating system needs to free up RAM (typically when a low watermark is reached). This temporary storage of RAM to disk is commonly known as swapping or paging (herein referred to as swapping). Depending on the platform, the term swap space can be a swap partition, a swap file, a page file (Windows) or a shared memory segment (IBM i platforms).
Modern servers have sufficient RAM combined with sufficient swap space and memory management systems to run Oracle GoldenGate. However, increasing the amount of RAM available to Oracle GoldenGate may significantly improve its performance, as well as that of the system in general.
Typical Oracle GoldenGate installations provide RAM in multiples of gigabytes to prevent excessive swapping of RAM pages to disk. The more contention there is for RAM the more swap space that is used.
Excessive swapping to disk causes performance issues for the Extract process in particular, because it must store data from each open transaction until a commit record is received. If Oracle GoldenGate runs on the same system as the database, the amount of RAM that is available becomes critical to the performance of both.
RAM and swap usage are controlled by the operating system, not the Oracle GoldenGate processes. The Oracle GoldenGate cache manager takes advantage of the memory management functions of the operating system to ensure that the Oracle GoldenGate processes work in a sustained and efficient manner. In most cases, users need not change the default Oracle GoldenGate memory management configuration.
For more information about evaluating Oracle GoldenGate memory requirements, see the CACHEMGR parameter in Reference for Oracle GoldenGate for Windows and UNIX.
The disk requirements for using Oracle GoldenGate for Oracle TimesTen are:
To determine the size of the Oracle GoldenGate download file, view the Size column before downloading your selected build from Oracle Software Delivery Cloud. The value shown is the size of the files in compressed form. The size of the expanded Oracle GoldenGate installation directory will be significantly larger on disk. For more information, see Section 2.2, "Understanding and Obtaining the Oracle GoldenGate Distribution."
To install Oracle GoldenGate into a cluster environment, install the Oracle GoldenGate binaries and files on a shared file system that is available to all cluster nodes.
An additional 1 GB of disk space on any system that hosts Oracle GoldenGate trails, which are files that contain the working data. You may need more or less than this amount, because the space that is consumed by the trails depends on the volume of data that will be processed. See the guidelines for sizing trails in Administering Oracle GoldenGate for Windows and UNIX.
The network requirements for using Oracle GoldenGate for Oracle TimesTen are:
Configure the system to use TCP/IP services, including DNS. Oracle GoldenGate supports IPv4 and IPv6 and can operate in a system that supports one or both of these protocols.
Configure the network with the host names or IP addresses of all systems that will be hosting Oracle GoldenGate processes and to which Oracle GoldenGate will be connecting. Host names are easier to use.
Oracle GoldenGate requires some unreserved and unrestricted TCP/IP ports, the number of which depends on the number and types of processes in your configuration. See Administering Oracle GoldenGate for Windows and UNIX for details on how to configure the Manager process to handle the required ports.
Keep a record of the ports that you assigned to Oracle GoldenGate. You will specify them with parameters when configuring the Manager process.
Configure your firewalls to accept connections through the Oracle GoldenGate ports.
The operating system privileges for using Oracle GoldenGate for Oracle TimesTen are:
To install on UNIX, the person who installs Oracle GoldenGate must have read and write privileges on the Oracle GoldenGate installation directory.
The Oracle GoldenGate Replicat and Manager processes must operate as an operating system user that has privileges to read, write, and delete files and subdirectories in the Oracle GoldenGate directory. In addition, the Manager process requires privileges to control all other Oracle GoldenGate processes.
Dedicate the Replicat and Manager operating system users to Oracle GoldenGate. Sensitive information might be available to anyone who runs an Oracle GoldenGate process.
To install Oracle GoldenGate on an Intel Itanium system, the vcredist_IA64.exe runtime library package must be installed. You can download this package from the Microsoft website. This package includes Visual Studio DLLs necessary for Oracle GoldenGate to operate on the Itanium platform. If these libraries are not installed, Oracle GoldenGate generates the following error:
The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0150002). Click on Ok to terminate the application.
The operating system and the command console must have the same character sets. Mismatches occur on Microsoft Windows systems, where the operating system is set to one character set, but the DOS command prompt uses a different, older DOS character set. Oracle GoldenGate uses the character set of the operating system to send information to GGSCI command output; therefore a non-matching console character set causes characters not to display correctly. You can set the character set of the console before opening a GGSCI session by using the following DOS command:
chcp OS_character_set
If the characters do not display correctly after setting the code page, try changing the console font to Lucida Console, which has an extended character set.
Other programs you can use with Oracle GoldenGate for Oracle TimesTen are:
Before installing Oracle GoldenGate on a Windows system, install and configure the Microsoft Visual C ++ 2010 SP1 Redistributable Package. Make certain it is the SP1 version of this package, and make certain to get the correct bit version for your server. This package installs runtime components of Visual C++ Libraries. For more information, and to download this package, go to http://www.microsoft.com">>http://www.microsoft.com.
Oracle GoldenGate fully supports virtual machine environments created with any virtualization software on any platform. When installing Oracle GoldenGate into a virtual machine environment, select a build that matches the database and the operating system of the virtual machine, not the host system.
This section describes the database requirements for using Oracle GoldenGate for Oracle TimesTen.
Create a database user that is dedicated to Oracle GoldenGate. It can be the same user for all of the Oracle GoldenGate processes that must connect to a database:
Replicat (target database)
DEFGEN (source or target database)
To preserve the security of your data, and to monitor Oracle GoldenGate processing accurately, do not permit other users, applications, or processes to log on as, or operate as, the Oracle GoldenGate database user.
Keep a record of the database users. They must be specified in the Oracle GoldenGate parameter files with the USERID parameter.
The limitations and non-supported items for Oracle TimesTen are:
Capture (extraction) of DML operations is not supported.
Capture and replication of DDL (data definition language) operations is not supported.
The support of range and precision for floating-point numbers depends on the host machine. In general, the precision is accurate to 16 significant digits, but you should review the database documentation to determine the expected approximations. Oracle GoldenGate rounds or truncates values that exceed the supported precision.
Oracle GoldenGate supports timestamp data from 0001/01/03:00:00:00 to 9999/12/31:23:59:59. If a timestamp is converted from GMT to local time, these limits also apply to the resulting timestamp. Depending on the time zone, conversion may add or subtract hours, which can cause the timestamp to exceed the lower or upper supported limit.
Modifying the Primary Key Column value is not supported.
Limitations on Automatic Heartbeat Table support are as follows:
Oracle GoldenGate supports only Delivery on TimesTen so no mechanism is required to populate/update the heartbeat tables using any event/job schedulers.
The ALTER HEARTBEATTABLE command is not supported and if used is ignored.
The ADD HEARTBEATTABLE command with the FREQUENCY, PURGE_FREQUENCY, or RETENTION_TIME option is not supported. When any of these options are specified with the ADD HEARTBEATTABLE command, a warning is displayed that the option is ignored.
Since TimesTen does not have any internal event/job schedulers, automatic purging of heartbeat history tables cannot occur. As such, you should explicitly drop or truncate the corresponding heartbeat objects to suit your environment.