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What is Change Data Capture?
Change Data Capture (CDC) is a robust and one of the most commonly used Techniques for Integrating Data. It emphasizes on recognizing, capturing, and delivering all updations/modifications made to data sources. It is the process of capturing changes made to a data storage medium such as a database, data warehouse, etc, and replicating those changes to the destination storage location with CDC tools. These modifications often relate to operations such as data addition, deletion, updating, etc.
A simple method of Data Replication is to leverage a Database Dump to export a database and import it into a DataWarehouse/Lake, however, this is not a scalable approach. Change Data Capture will only record changes made to the data storage and apply them to the target data storage. CDC minimizes overhead and allows for real-time analytics. It also allows for incremental loading and avoids the need for bulk load updates.
CDC is typically leveraged in Warehousing environments. This is owing to the fact that identifying and keeping the state of data up-to-date is one of the main responsibilities of a warehouse, but it may be used in any database or data repository system.
What is the need for CDC?
Some of the advantages of using Change Data Capture (CDC) are as follows:
- Rapid: CDC replicates a smaller volume of data from the source database, i.e., only the rows that have changed. As a result, the replication process is completed quickly.
- Minimal Network Burden: CDC transfers fewer data from the source to the destination, i.e., just the altered rows. As a result, the bandwidth is not stressed.
- Minimal Overhead for Production Database: When CDC is implemented correctly, the replication processes have no effect on your production database. Instead of locking committed transactions until the replication is finished, this frees up resources for transactions.
- Reduced WAN Cost: It lowers the cost of data transfer across the wide-area network (WAN) by delivering only incremental updates.
Why do you need a Change Data Capture CDC tool?
Each organization may create extensive CDC tools from the bottom up. However, there are several shortcomings in the homegrown method that consider using CDC tools more important than developing an in-house solution.
The limitations associated with building in-house CDC tools are as follows:
- Complex Task: CDC Data Replication is not a simple one-time project. CDC is often a demanding task owing to the unique nature and structure of database providers. All these have varying row/data formats. This is further increasing with the hassle of accessing Log Records.
- Maintenance Cost: Writing the script to implement the CDC Process is just the first step. When your database and log patterns change, you must also keep a customized solution on hand to map these changes on a regular basis. This suggests that a significant amount of time and money will go to maintaining your in-house CDC process.
- Overburdening Developers: Developers in companies are frequently confront with public inquiries. The additional labor of developing your own CDC solution will have an impact on your current revenue-generating projects. Because the developers’ time will now spread over.
Top 5 Change Data Capture (CDC) Tools
The top 5 CDC Tools in the Industry are as follows:
1) Hevo Data
Hevo Data is a fully automated No-code Data Pipeline platform that helps to transfer data from 100+ sources (including 40+ free sources) to your desired data warehouse or a destination of your choice and visualize it in a BI tool. Hevo is fully managed and entirely automates the process of Change Data Capture. You can stream data in real-time from your data sources straight to your target destination. Hevo further enables you to enrich the data. You can transform it into an analysis-ready format. All this without having to code!
Hevo houses a fault-tolerant architecture. It will assure that your critical data secure and consistent. Using Hevo’s Point-and-Click interface, you can integrate with any data source and instantly move data from any data source to Data Warehouses such as Amazon Redshift, Firebolt, Snowflake or Google BigQuery; Data Lakes such as Databricks, Amazon S3; and Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB Databases and many more.
Check out what makes Hevo amazing:
- Fully Automated: Hevo is exceptionally easy to set up. All you need is a matter of a few minutes to get going.
- Real-time Data Transfer: Hevo offers real-time data migration, ensuring that you always have analysis-ready data.
- Scalable Infrastructure: Hevo provides out of the box connectors for over 100+ platforms. It thus allows you to grow your data infrastructure as needed.
- 24/7 Live Support: The Hevo team extends excellent support to you at all times. You may get your answers round the clock through chat, support calls, or emails.
- Schema Management: Hevo automates the arduous work of schema management by automatically detecting the schema of incoming data and mapping it to the destination schema.
- Live Monitoring: Hevo empowers you to keep track of your data flow at all times.
With Hevo, you can set up fast and reliable Change Data Capture in just 3 steps:
- Authenticate and connect to your data source
- Select CDC as your replication mode
- Select the desired target destination where you want to send your data
2) Keboola
Keboola is a Cloud-based Data Platform that enables customers to quickly and easily integrate, modify, and distribute critical information for their internal analytics initiatives and data products.
It is an end-to-end data operation platform with out-of-the-box functionality for a wide range of data operations. Keboola provides over 250 connectors that connect data sources and destinations. From SaaS applications to data warehouses Kebool helps extract, transform, load, and replicate your data from a wide variety of data sources. It does more than merely duplicate data, it also helps you design end-to-end ETL data pipelines. It aids in bidirectional data replication across native cloud solutions and on-premise or within the same environment.
3) IBM Infosphere
IBM Infosphere is a Data Integration platform for Data Cleansing, Transformation, and Monitoring. Its highly scalable, flexible and can handle all volumes of data. Infosphere Information Server supports massively parallel processing (MPP).
IBM InfoSphere Change Data Capture is a popular data replication solution that leverages the technique of CDC to copy data across to the desired databases, queues, and even Integration or ETL systems like IBM InfoSphere DataStage. Though IBM InfoSphere Change Data Capture may connect to a variety of data sources. And it is ideal for the IBM data product suite, such as IBM Db2 databases, IBM Cognos databases, or IBM Informix databases.
4) Qlik Replicate
Qlik Replicate is an application for Data Ingestion, Replication, and Streaming. It gives you real-time insights into your enterprise data. It allows for data Ingestion, Replication, and Streaming across numerous sources and targets. Qlik securely transports data both on-premises and in the cloud. Qlik Replicate processes Big Data loads using parallel threading, making it a suitable choice for Big Data analytics and connectors.
Furthermore, this software integrates data from several data sources, including RDBMS (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, DB2, etc), data warehouses, and cloud suppliers (AWS, GCP, Azure). This fully integrated CDC Data Replication solution allows you to effortlessly monitor and replicate data changes in several corporate data sources. Hence, enterprises can benefit from a single product that satisfies all of their storage and real-time data integration needs with support for CDC for Oracle, CDC for SQL Server, CDC, and other mainframes.
5) Oracle GoldenGate
Oracle GoldenGate supports log-based CDC and real-time delivery between heterogeneous systems. It offers real-time replication, manipulation, and filtering of transactional data from databases.
It is primarily aims to replicate Oracle Database using optimized high-speed data movement. However, it operates to reproduce a variety of sources across cloud providers, such as MySQL, Teradata, MongoDB, Spark, PostgreSQL, and other Cloud-based Data Stores. Oracle GoldenGate is used for end-to-end monitoring of stream data processing solutions, in addition to data replication, without the requirement to allocate or manage computing environments.
Conclusion
This blog introduces the top 5 Change Data Capture (CDC) Tools in the industry in detail. It also gives a quick overview of Change Data Capture and its benefits.
Magdalena Polka is a Business Solution Designer and an Information Technology / Project Management consultant and author with over 15 years of software development, management and project management experience.