Confluent launches Premium Connector to Oracle Databases to accelerate IT modernization
Confluent announced Confluent’s Premium Connector for Oracle Change Data Capture (CDC) Source, a bridge for one of the most common and critical sources of enterprise data to connect to Apache Kafka.
It is now possible to identify and capture data that has been added to, updated, or removed from Oracle databases and make those events available in real time across a business. Confluent aims to create a central nervous system for organizations to harness all data in motion, but that is only possible if every environment is interconnected.
As the first in a series of Premium Connectors, Confluent makes integrations with complex, high-value systems seamless, reliable, and cost-effective to establish a continuously flowing stream of data that powers the business.
“Running on outdated data hurts the quality of customer experiences and efficiency of operations, so it’s critical to ensure data can flow across all environments,” said Dave Menninger, Senior VP and Research Director, Ventana Research.
“Breaking down data silos and making it easier to integrate enterprise systems like Oracle is important for achieving IT modernization goals. Confluent’s latest release helps accomplish those goals.”
Oracle is well known for its relational database systems, which are used across many enterprises to store data for critical applications and drive operational decision-making. However, it is extremely difficult to connect this information with distributed data systems like Kafka, which causes data to be trapped in silos.
The integration work can take 24 months of engineering time needed to design, test, and maintain this highly complex connection. Few tools exist in the market today to address this need, and those solutions can cost millions of dollars every year as licensing costs increase with usage.
“There’s an urgent need for organizations to stream, store, and process data across all areas of a business to unlock real-time applications and operations,” said Ganesh Srinivasan, chief product and engineering officer, Confluent.
“Our new Premium Connectors represent a big step forward to making event streaming a central nervous system for any enterprise. With the ability to tie historical, enterprise data together with real-time events, companies can react and respond to everything happening in the business, quickly and with the right context.”
Break down data silos
The Premium Connector for Oracle CDC enables development teams to securely capture changes happening in Oracle databases and stores it as different Kafka topics.
Paired with Confluent’s complete event streaming platform, ksqlDB, and sink connectors for modern data systems, enterprises can enable key use cases like data synchronization, real-time analytics, and data warehouse modernization that power new and improved Customer 360, fraud detection, machine learning, and more.
Organizations can jump-start technical use cases by leveraging the pre-built connector’s out-of-the-box enterprise features and functionality, such as:
- Redo topic logs: Protect high-value, transactional data stored in Oracle databases by backing up the redo log to a distributed, fault-tolerant system in Kafka.
- Snapshots: Enable real-time processing of the latest change events in Oracle without sacrificing latency by expediting the time it takes for new consumer applications to synchronize with each Oracle table’s current state.
- Table change event topics: Prevent unauthorized access and control who can access Oracle change data by separating each table’s change events into different Kafka topics.
- Record keys: Reliably share data in Oracle by consistently processing and easily identifying which record has been changed by the primary key.