My relationship with Oracle Golden Gate is first emotional and then professional. My Oracle Corporation boot camp was in Ireland in early January 2010 after Oracle had acquired Golden Gate, and so most of my boot camp mates were from the EMEA Golden Gate team! We rarely talked tech stuff when in front of a pint of Guinness, but when the sales reps would talk about the product “Golden Gate”, I could see in their eyes all the excitement and admiration for a true great engineering product. This is a rare thing. You tend to see passion for a software product in the eyes of the techies and less in the eyes of a pure sales team. This admiration somehow got into me without even experiencing the wonders of the product. You can say they were a great sales team, making me believe in the magic of a software product I’ve never saw in action! Kudos to Richard Dobber, Steve Roy, Rolf Linder, and most of all Mr. Todd McGrail.
This somehow got into the boot camp main trainer’s mind too, and also because he wasn’t quite fluent in it yet, he asked the main man (Sjaak Vossepoel) to make a presentation about Golden Gate. That blew our minds even further! Knowing all the use cases, and customer case studies made us all believe this was not just another Oracle acquisition, but a first class product that would change the data distribution landscape in the Oracle arena for ever.
When back to Portugal I had the pleasure to work with the Portuguese Oracle Data Integration “guru” Octavio Oliveira, and he confirmed me all the qualities of the product, and so I got some time to get my hands dirty with it, and started to admire all it’s qualities too.
It seemed that I was somehow linked to Golden Gate (kind of fate!) when in April 2010, I was in Berlin for an Exadata EMEA training event and I met the only key guy on the former EMEA GG team that missed the boot camp: Kuli. He was one of the presenters of the event, like myself, and in the end of the day we had the opportunity to share a beer and talk a bit more. I got to admire not only the product but also the people behind it, at least in EMEA.
Another boot camp “blood brother” I’ve met again later in a Golden Gate workshop in Paris, in late 2010, was Christophe Ishkanian. He is not just a “guru” in GG, he explains it very well and he can show you in simple terms all the power of this singular product. He evens puts up with my occasional texting with last minute doubts!
So when this book reached my hands I knew I had to share the news with the world 
Looking a bit further into the author’s CV, you cannot expect nothing less than a top quality book. Specially because he is not your average blogger or Oracle Professional (former Oracle ACS Engineer), the man has a true talent for writing about technical matters.
From the book: “With over 15 years of Oracle experience, and an OCP since Oracle 8i, the author has extensive knowledge of Oracle databases, including Enterprise Linux and RAC, coupled with the ability to design and build high performance distributed database systems. He has trained internal and external clients in Data Warehousing and Data Replication techniques, and continues to share his knowledge and experience through his own website: www.oracle11ggotchas.com“
Picking up the book what I admired the most is the way it is organized. Chapter 1 gets you started introducing all the key concepts, but right on chapter 2 you’re installing it and preparing the data sync. The choices are overwhelming! So you got to decide yourself on what is the right design for your solution and that’s what chapter 3 gives you. So you can deploy it without mistakes chapter 4, 5 and 6 will guide you through the configuration techniques, until you hit the Golden Gate and Exadata on chapter 6, that might make you go deeper in chapter 7 if you will apply some kind of advanced transformations to your data.
After all is set, you need to monitor it (chapter eight) and eventually tune it for better performance (chapter 9). Don’t forget to jump right into chapter 10 if you can’t troubleshoot your Golden Gate configuration. There you can also find a section on how to upgrade your GG product.
The end is quite surprising since after two Appendixes of command syntaxes, scripts, and files dictionary, you have a true master’s voice on how OGG will evolve in the future with very useful URLs for places on the web where you’ll find discussions about this theme.
The book publisher is so amazing that they even prepared a 23 page PDF with a sample of the book, that you can download here.
You can buy this great book here: http://link.packtpub.com/gKfFaF
Good reading!
LMC
