Highlights:

  • The recent Arcion release also makes it easier for businesses to manage Data Definition Language (DDL) schema modifications and data transformation.

California-based Arcion (previously Blitzz), which provides a fully managed platform to copy transactional data to cloud-based data platforms in real-time, is all set to make data extraction from Oracle databases faster using a new native log reader.

The feature, a part of Arcion’s most recent release, will help enterprises read logs straight from their Oracle instance during replication. This will eliminate the need to use Logminer or other less reliable or less efficient sources. The company claims that this, along with its distributed and parallel architectural design, ensures unlimited scalability and 10 times faster data extraction to target systems like Databricks, Snowflake, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SingleStore, and Yugabyte.

“Arcion is the only end-to-end multithreaded CDC [change data capture] solution that auto-scales vertically and horizontally. Any process Arcion runs on source and target is parallelized using patent-pending techniques to achieve maximum throughput. There isn’t a single step within the pipeline that is single-threaded. It gives Arcion users ultra-low latency CDC replication and can always keep up with the forever increasing data volume on the source. If an enterprise wants to migrate or replicate terabyte-scale data that requires high throughput, Arcion is the answer,” Gary Hagmueller, the CEO of the company.

While newer data integration tools like Airbyte, Debezium, StreamSet, and Kafka Connectors do not provide this feature, older CDC tools (Qlik Attunity, Fivetran-acquired HVR and Debezium) offer this solution. However, as Hagmueller said, all of these traditional solutions demand significant setup and management effort, which is not the case with Arcion.

Facilitating the copying of data

The recent Arcion release also makes it easier for businesses to manage Data Definition Language (DDL) schema modifications and data transformation in addition to providing a native reader for Oracle customers.

As a part of the latter, the platform’s capacity to support schema evolution has been expanded to automatically capture DDL modifications from a source database and copy it to the destination data platform. Data engineers can save on time as they no longer have to manually maintain schema alignment between source and target databases, thanks to this capability. Earlier, they had to halt the replication process and restart it from scratch by taking a snapshot of the source system if the DDL or schema on the source database changed. As a result, this led to downtime, a waste of costly computing resources, and a possibility of human error and data loss.

“Oracle Golden Gate is one CDC solution that supports automatic schema evolution (DDL). But Arcion is the only CDC platform that supports out-of-the-box DDL with modern analytic warehouses like Snowflake or Databricks. Oracle Golden Gate does not provide very robust support for Snowflake and Databricks, so anyone adopting such systems will find that solution inadequate. Alternatively, the data team has to be ready to invest in manual resources to handle the schema evolution with other alternative CDC solutions,” the CEO noted.

Arcion is also launching a zero-code capability that provides adaptable, high-performance streaming column transformations on the fly to help businesses manage data transformations better. As a result, there is no longer a need to use technical resources to develop a staging table (like Kafka) and write customized code to modify data on the destination. SLA delays were also a result of the practice.

Availability of the Oracle log reader

The other two features are now generally available as part of the fully-hosted version of Arcion, while the Oracle log reader is now only available in beta and will be made more widely available later this month.

With this update, Arcion also includes Imply (established by the people who created Apache Druid) as a new target, Google BigQuery, and Azure-Managed SQL Server as new sources. The technology facilitates the replication of data across more than 20 enterprise databases and data warehouses. The business also obtained USD13 million in series A capital a few months earlier, valued at USD65 million.

“The data replication and protection software market showed much greater-than-expected resilience in 2020 despite the pandemic,” Phil Goodwin, research director at IDC’s infrastructure systems, platforms, and technologies group, said. “We expect this market to return to its normal growth pattern, with a 2.7% CAGR through 2025. The public cloud services portion of the market is the bright spot, with an expected 11.6% CAGR during that time.”