Replace Oracle Streams with Quest SharePlex

Hi, this is Clay Jackson. I'm a sales engineer here at Quest Software. Today, I'd like to talk to you about how to replace Oracle Streams with Quest SharePlex, the golden alternative to Oracle Streams. As you probably know, Oracle Streams is not available in Oracle 19c or later. Here is a note from the Oracle 18c release notes. Streams has been deprecated for some time now. And they're finally getting around to actually removing it from the product. So what are your options if you're using Oracle Streams and want to upgrade to Oracle 19c or beyond? Well, you can do without if you're using Streams for replication. Now you can figure out ways to go without replication. You could purchase Oracle Golden Gate, which is what Oracle would like you to do. That's a very pricey alternative. There are other replication solutions out there on the market you could look at. Or you could roll your own with database triggers and database links, something you might have done before Streams was available. But that's no fun. And that takes lots of maintenance, either. There is another alternative, though. And that's Quest SharePlex. Let's talk about SharePlex for a minute. Here is our SharePlex architecture. We start by reading the redo logs, and capturing the change data that's happening in Oracle, and moving that data along through a read process that is kind of a traffic cop, [? re-decides ?] what data you're going to replicate, and then moves along these export/import processes. This isn't Oracle's export, import. This is our own proprietary processes that move data very quickly across the network much faster than Oracle network services. Put the data in a post queue, where our post-process transforms it into SQL and applies it to the target database. Now, you know, when you're doing replication, there are some things you want to watch for. One of them is you want to make sure that the data on the target system looks like the data on the source system at all times. Well, with SharePlex, we give you a feature built right into the product called compare and repair. You can ask SharePlex to compare a table or a schema. And we'll tell you if the table or schema on the source and the target are the same. And if they're not, we'll give you the SQL to make them the same. And if you told us to repair, we'll actually repair it for you and make the target look like the source. All that's included in this SharePlex product at no additional cost, no additional Oracle pieces to buy or anything you need to do there. I should also mention that SharePlex supports Oracle 11, Oracle 12, Oracle 18, Oracle 19, soon to be Oracle 21, current versions of Oracle. And we also run on Oracle Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition, or anything in between. So we're not dependent on any additional Oracle features or capabilities. We can also replicate between disparate systems, disparate operating systems. So if you're running on Linux today and you want to run an AX tomorrow, if you want to replicate your system from Solaris to Linux, or Solaris to AX, or AX to Linux, we can do all of that. We can handle that with SharePlex with no issues whatsoever. So let's look a little deeper. I can't actually show you these Streams configuration files, because those are Oracle intellectual property. But if you need to set up Streams, you're going to need to configure both servers. It's going to require some PL/SQL coding and running multiple scripts, all in all, a real pain to set up, and manage, and maintain. If something changes, you want to replicate a different schema, you want replicate additional schema, your table changes or whatever, you're going to have to go back and edit those multiple scripts. With SharePlex, we have one configuration file on the source. You can use vi or Notepad to edit that configuration file. And two lines are going to replicate an entire schema. Here are those two lines right here. You specify the data source as a source_sid. You expand the wild card for the AR schema, replicate it from the AR schema to the AR schema-- this could have just as easily been a different schema-- and the host name and the target_sid. That's all there is to it. And by the way, if something changes, you do a DDL operation on any table as you get under replication, SharePlex is going to copy that DDL, and make those changes for you on the target, and keep them available. So I hope you enjoyed this short presentation on SharePlex replacing Oracle Streams. Here are some additional resources if you need them. And feel free to give us a call, and contact us, and see how SharePlex can help you live without Streams. Thanks a lot.