Oracle Change Data Capture Support in Spotfire® Streaming

At least of Spotfire® Streaming 10.6.1, the product documentation is not entirely clear about what support is available for the various Change Data Capture (CDC)-style functionality with which versions of Oracle's database products. As with anything in software technology, it's an evolving story. This article is an unofficial summary of the relationship between Spotfire® Streaming and Oracle's CDC methods; for anyone wanting a more official statement of support, please seek it by creating a Support Case with Spotfire® Product Support team.

Spotfire® Streaming has two adapter products that are directly relevant to change data capture with Oracle. Neither of them were designed to work with Oracle's current database releases (19c). Oracle recommends that Oracle database users use Oracle's GoldenGate product set for CDC uses. One of the ways GoldenGate can communicate CDC events with external non-database systems (such as Spotfire® Streaming) is to use the GoldenGate Java Adapter to publish CDC events via the Java Message Service (JMS). Spotfire® Streaming has a JMS Consumer operator that could be used to receive such events, and then what is actually done with these events is up to the particular Streaming application. There is at this time no more direct or pre-packaged integration between Spotfire® Streaming and Oracle GoldenGate.

For older versions of Oracle before 19c, which as of today still represent the bulk of Oracle database deployments, there are two choices: the Database Change Data Capture Input Adapter and the Oracle CDC LogMiner adapter set.

The Database Change Data Capture Input Adapter uses an older method of CDC that Oracle calls DBMS_CDC_PUBLISH in its documentation. This method is used by older versions of Oracle -- not sure when it started, but this method was deprecated by Oracle as of Oracle 11g and is mentioned as "desupported and not included" in Oracle 12c.

The Oracle CDC LogMiner Parser Adapter and Oracle CDC LogMiner Connection Adapter set can also be used. This method of CDC is supported by Oracle up to and including Oracle 18, even though it was deprecated as early as Oracle 12.2. However, Oracle removed support for LogMiner in Oracle 19c, as this Spotfire® Support Knowledge Base article notes. My understanding is that Spotfire® supports Streaming users using the LogMiner adapters up to and including Oracle 18.