Introduction Have you ever started a bulk data load that ran lightning-fast initially, only to watch it grind to a crawl hours later? You're not alone. This is one of the most common—and most misunderstood—performance issues in Oracle databases. In this post, I'll share a real-world case study where a data load that started at 550,000 rows/hour degraded to just 40,000 rows/hour—a 93% performance drop. More importantly, I'll explain exactly why this happens and how to fix it. The Scenario Our team was loading data into a staging table as part of a nightly ETL process. The setup looked like this: Table Configuration: CREATE TABLE STG_CUSTOMER_EXTRACT ( CUSTOMER_ID NUMBER, ACCOUNT_NUMBER VARCHAR2(50), BILLING_ID VARCHAR2(30), REGION_CODE VARCHAR2(10), LOAD_DATE DATE ); -- Three indexes to support downstream queries CREATE INDEX IDX_CUSTOMER_ID ON STG_CUSTOMER_EXTRACT(CUSTOMER_ID); CREATE INDEX IDX_ACCOUNT_NUM ON STG_CUSTOMER...
Introduction: Why Your GoldenGate Trails Need Encryption If you're running Oracle GoldenGate in production, your trail files are essentially the heartbeat of your data replication. They contain captured transactions, metadata, and complete before/after images of your data changes. Without encryption, these files are vulnerable—whether sitting on shared storage, captured in backups, or transmitted across networks. In this comprehensive guide, I'll walk you through implementing AES256 encryption for Oracle GoldenGate trail files in a bidirectional replication setup. We'll cover both local trail storage encryption and network transmission security between two hosts. What You'll Achieve By the end of this tutorial, you'll have: Encrypted trail files written to disk (data at rest protection) Encrypted network transmission between source and target systems Bidirectional encryption working seamlessly in both directions Minimal performance impact while mainta...