Oracle GoldenGate - Installation on Windows - Part 1

This guide discusses the approach to install Oracle GoldenGate on a Windows Vista environment. It also explains how to run GoldenGate for the first time on a Oracle 11g database and extract the results. I've written this guide purely with my experience to setup GoldenGate on my vista machine. I've also referred to the Oracle documentation for GoldenGate during this process.

Before we move any further:-

The version of Oracle database used for this tutorial:-

Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.1.0.6.0 - Production
PL/SQL Release 11.1.0.6.0 - Production
CORE    11.1.0.6.0      Production
TNS for 32-bit Windows: Version 11.1.0.6.0 - Production
NLSRTL Version 11.1.0.6.0 - Production

It is assumed that a version of Oracle 11g database is already running on the source system. Download Golden gate from Oracle Website and keep the contents ready. Let us move on with the installation process.

Setup ORACLE_HOME and ORACLE_SID

1) Before even starting anything, make sure that ORACLE_HOME and ORACLE_SID are set properly in the machine where you want to test GoldenGate. If you have already set these variables on your PC, you may wish to proceed to step 2.

Navigate to MyComputer -> Properties -> Advanced -> Environment Variables. We have to check if ORACLE_HOME and ORACLE_SID are setup properly here.

To set ORACLE_HOME:-

a) Open Registry to find the current value and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ORACLE\KEY_OraDb11g_home1.
b) You will find a key with name ORACLE_HOME. In my case it was, C:\app\<username>\product\11.1.0\db_1
c) Add this key, value as an environment variable under system variables.

To set ORACLE_SID:-

a) Open Registry to find the current value and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ORACLE\KEY_OraDb11g_home1.
b) You will find a key with name ORACLE_SID. In my case it was, MYDB
c) Add this key, value as an environment variable under system variables.

We have now setup the required ORACLE_HOME and ORACLE_SID  variables which would be used by GoldenGate.

2) GoldenGate requires Microsoft VC++ runtime libraries. Download the correct version of these libraries for your PC. Oracle documentation specifies that VC++ 2005 SP1 Redistributable  package needs to be downloaded and installed.  This is required as this installation would give us the components required to run applications that are developed on VC++ but the source machine where we are testing does not have VC++ installed.  The link provided below is a valid one for the libraries. The installable is around 2.6 MB at the time of writing this post. Download and install this in your PC. Proceed to the next step once this is done.

If you are successful till this point, you may move on to the next step of the installation. Setting up GoldenGate binaries.