The term "real time" has often been used as a puffed-up euphemism for "pretty current" or to describe an elusive, hypothetical goal for just-in-time information. However, the partnership between Teradata and GoldenGate Software proves that real time is a reality and can offer businesses countless new opportunities for improved data management and enterprise growth.

So, what does real-time data management look like? What is it truly good for? Consider this example: An online retailer sells a diverse array of products: clothing, electronics, luxury vacations and more. Without real-time data management, that retailer must cast a wide net of marketing e-mails to try to snag potential customers.

However, using the Teradata/GoldenGate real-time solution, that retailer could track and store the browsing habits of each visitor to its Web site, even those who didn't make a purchase. The retailer could then use that information to personalize the on-screen ads users see while browsing the site. The company could also use up-to-the-second sales figures to create or modify marketing campaigns on the fly and target them, with laser efficiency, to exactly the right people.

Teradata is already the premier data warehouse solution for companies with complex data coming from multiple sources across the enterprise. But the company's alliance with GoldenGate allows users timelier access to important data. With the joint solution, a business can retrieve real-time transactional and operational data from disparate enterprise systems to populate its active data warehouse for immediate use by employees across the enterprise.

Companies find that having real-time data at their fingertips provides unprecedented opportunities for improving customer service and customizing the customer experience. Customer service representatives can easily provide customers with the current status of the customer's order or service request; airlines might leverage the joint solution to seamlessly re-route a stranded traveler within seconds of a missed or canceled flight; banks and financial institutions could proactively offer new products and services to customers during online banking sessions.

How it works
The GoldenGate Transactional Data Management (TDM) platform unobtrusively reads a company's native database logs, captures changed data (i.e., inserts, updates, deletes) and moves the changed data, via a proprietary trail, to the target Teradata warehouse.

GoldenGate's "light footprint" on the source system makes it easy to access critical data from various customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning and supply chain systems that the data warehouse needs with sub-second latency. GoldenGate TDM components include:

	Capture. "Sniffs" the database logs for relevant information
	Delivery. Applies the data transactions to the Teradata warehouse
	Manager. Provides a variety of administrative and reporting functions

The Teradata/GoldenGate solution works with virtually all structured databases. Furthermore, GoldenGate can move data bi-directionally to and from heterogeneous database, hardware and operating system environments.

Additionally, Teradata and GoldenGate engineers have co-developed a solution for companies to maintain multiple Teradata environments. In this "dual-active" mode, two Teradata warehouses actively process queries and look-ups to ensure mission-critical availability.

Solution benefits
Because GoldenGate can read native database transaction logs, transactions are captured and delivered to the Teradata warehouse without disabling the source database system or performing full table scans to determine any delta changes. Once GoldenGate's Capture component is configured to pull specific tables and columns, it continuously trickle-feeds that data to the target warehouse, giving users the key to timelier, more accurate business decisions, improved customer service and, ultimately, increased revenue.

enlarge GoldenGate enables real-time data warehousing by capturing and delivering changed data from multiple diverse source database systems with sub-second latency.

Historically, companies have loaded transactional changed data into their data warehouse during business "after hours" using batch processing tools such as extract, transform and load (ETL) or extract, load and transform (ELT). But for many companies, the notion of "after hours" is obsolete and data that is even hours old is unacceptable.

GoldenGate can perform some data transformation (basic joins, adding and deleting columns, etc.) on the fly for situations when a business requires the freshest data in its Teradata warehouse, while more extensive transformations can be executed using an ETL or ELT tool.

Companies that implement the Teradata/GoldenGate solution are finding that once they've experienced what real-time data can do for their business, there's no going back. No longer an elusive or hypothetical concept, real-time business operations have become both a reality and a requirement for businesses that want to effectively meet their customers' needs, outpace their competitors and continue to grow into the future. T

PRODUCT GoldenGate Real-Time Data Integration for Data Warehousing ATTRIBUTES Captures transactional data from heterogeneous systems to feed Teradata warehouse Performs light data transformations; co-exists with ETL and ELT solutions for heavier transformations High-volume data capabilities with low latency (sub-seconds) BENEFITS Up-to-the-minute data available in the data warehouse for lookups, reporting and analytics COMPANY GoldenGate Software is a leading provider of high-availability and real-time data integration solutions. Founded in 1995; headquartered in San Francisco, Calif., U.S.A.

Lori Janies writes about business and technology for various publications.

Teradata Magazine-March 2008