The majority of IT decision-makers, today, face delays in their business decisions due to slow data processing. As companies are collecting vast amounts of data, it is hampering the speed at which processors can run queries and extract the desired results. Change Data Capture (CDC) is one of the most popular methods of carrying out Data Replication process, that can speed up your data processing. In this article, we will explore the best CDC tools that can increase your business’s data processing speed.
However, before we learn about CDC tools, let’s learn a little about Change Data Capture and its importance.
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What is Change Data Capture (CDC)?
Change Data Capture (CDC) is the process that captures the changes made to a data storage medium like Database, Data Warehouse, etc. These changes usually refer to operations like data addition, deletion, updating, etc.
A straightforward way of Data Replication is to take a Database Dump that will export a Database and import it to a Data Warehouse/Lake, but this is not a scalable approach. Change Data Capture will capture just the changes made to the Database and apply those to the target Database.
CDC reduces the overhead and supports real-time analytics. It enables incremental loading and eliminates the need for bulk load updating.
To learn more about Change Data Capture, visit here.
Why Do We Need CDC?
CDC offers several advantages to your organization:
- Faster Decisions: CDC enables faster decision-making by replicating data in real-time with zero-downtime database migrations.
- Synchronous Replication: CDC can be used for real-time data replication since it uses transaction logs to copy databases. CDC enables streaming ETL pipelines and allows for real-time analytics.
- Free Production Resources: CDCs transfer data from a production database to an analytic database, via logs. Log-based data transfer is a highly efficient approach for limiting impact on production resources when loading new data.
- Reduced Costs: CDCs can move data across a wide area network (WAN) and can optimize your costs by sending only incremental changes.
- Decreased Network Burden: With incremental uploads, CDC frees up your network bandwidth. It also offers fraud protection, and data synchronization across geographically distributed systems.
Why Do We Need a CDC Tool?
Now as you have understood the importance of Change Data Capture (CDC), the question arises, if one can develop an in-house CDC process, why does one need Change Data Capture tools?
Following limitations of developing a CDC solution will help you comprehend the necessity of using the best CDC tools for your business:
- Complex Task: CDC Data Replication is not a one-time easy to do project. CDC becomes a challenging task mainly due to the differences between database providers, varying record formats, and even the inconvenience of accessing log records.
- Regular Maintenance: The first step is to write a script that can implement the CDC process. When your database and log patterns change, you also need to maintain a customized solution that can map these changes regularly. This implies a lot of time and resources will be used up in maintaining your in-house CDC process.
- Overburdening: Developers in companies usually already face the burden of public queries. The added work of building your own CDC solution will affect your existing revenue-generating projects as the developers’ time will be divided now.
Choosing the ideal CDC tool that perfectly meets your business requirements can be challenging, especially when a large variety of CDC tools and open source CDC tools are available in the market.
To simplify your search, here is a comprehensive list of the 7 best Change Data Capture tools you can choose from and easily start setting up your Data Replication.
Best CDC Tools 1: Hevo Data
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Hevo allows you to replicate data in near real-time from 150+ sources to the destination of your choice including Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Databricks, and Firebolt, without writing a single line of code. Finding patterns and opportunities is easier when you don’t have to worry about maintaining the pipelines. So, with Hevo as your data pipeline platform, maintenance is one less thing to worry about.
For the rare times things do go wrong, Hevo ensures zero data loss. To find the root cause of an issue, Hevo also lets you monitor your workflow so that you can address the issue before it derails the entire workflow. Add 24*7 customer support to the list, and you get a reliable tool that puts you at the wheel with greater visibility. Check Hevo’s in-depth documentation to learn more.
If you don’t want SaaS tools with unclear pricing that burn a hole in your pocket, opt for a tool that offers a simple, transparent pricing model. Hevo has 3 usage-based pricing plans starting with a free tier, where you can ingest upto 1 million records.
Hevo was the most mature Extract and Load solution available, along with Fivetran and Stitch but it had better customer service and attractive pricing. Switching to a Modern Data Stack with Hevo as our go-to pipeline solution has allowed us to boost team collaboration and improve data reliability, and with that, the trust of our stakeholders on the data we serve.
– Juan Ramos, Analytics Engineer, Ebury
Check out how Hevo empowered Ebury to build reliable data products here.
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Best CDC Tools 2: IBM Infosphere
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IBM Infosphere is a data integration platform that enables data cleansing, transformation, and data monitoring. It can handle all volumes of data using its highly scalable and flexible data integration platform. Infosphere Information Server provides massively parallel processing (MPP) capabilities.
Infosphere CDC is for the organizations that want to replicate DB2 (a database product from IBM) to or from a z/OS (IBM mainframe operating system) system. Management Console provides the front-end functionality for Infosphere CDC allowing you to work with the databases in the sources and targets. It communicates with Infosphere CDC to support the data transfer.
To learn more about IBM Infosphere, visit here.
Best CDC Tools 3: Qlik Replicate (formerly Attunity Replicate)
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Qlik replicate is a data-ingestion and relocation tool. It provides real-time insights into enterprise data. It enables data replication, replication, and streaming across multiple sources and targets. Qlik transfers data securely both on-premise and in the cloud.
Qlik Replicate uses parallel streams to process big data payloads, making it a viable candidate for big data integration and analysis. This fully integrated CDC Data Replication tool enables you to easily monitor and replicate the data changes occurring in various corporate data sources.
With support for CDC for Oracle, CDC for SQL Server, CDC, and other mainframes, your team can benefit from a single tool that meets all their storage and real-time data integration needs.
To learn more about Qilk, visit here.
Best CDC Tools 4: Talend
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Talend builds CDC support into the enterprise-class open source data integration platform, Talend Data Integration. Talend CDC is based on a publish/subscribe model, where the publisher captures the changes in data in real-time. Then it makes it available to the subscribers which can be databases or applications.
Talend’s CDC works with several databases such as Oracle, MS SQL Server, DB2, MySQL, etc. With Talend, you can seamlessly work with complex process workflows by making use of the large suite of apps provided by Talend. You can manage the design, testing, and deployment of your integrations. It also provides a smooth drag and drops functionality along with an open studio feature for beginners.
To learn more about Talend, visit here.
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Download the Guide to Evaluate ETL Tools
Learn the 10 key parameters while selecting the right ETL tool for your use case.
Best CDC Tools 5: Oracle GoldenGate
GoldenGate provides log-based CDC and delivery between heterogeneous systems in real-time. It enables replication, transformation, and filtering of transactional data from databases in real-time.
Oracle GoldenGate leverages CDC Data Replication from multiple sources to provide real-time analysis. It is mainly used to optimize Oracle database replication for high-speed data movement, but it can also be used to replicate various sources, such as Microsoft, IBM DB2, MongoDB, MySQL, Spark, etc.
In addition to data replication, Oracle GoldenGate is also used for end-to-end monitoring of data processing solutions and does not require you to allocate or manage the computing environment.
To learn more about Oracle Golden Gate, visit here.
Best CDC Tools 6: Debezium
Debezium is an open-source distributed platform for CDC built on top of Apache Kafka. It is scalable and can handle data of large volumes.
Debezium constantly monitors databases and enables applications to stream row-level changes to data in the order they were committed to the databases. Debezium monitors even when your apps are down so that they can start where they left off.
Debezium has support for MySQL servers, PostgreSQL servers, SQL servers, and MongoDB replica sets or sharded clusters. Debezium is distributed and fault-tolerant. Information loss is minimized because events are recorded across multiple machines.
To learn more about Debezium, visit here.
Best CDC Tools 7: Apache StreamSets
Apache StreamSets is a free DataOps and real-time ETL tool that automatically converts data into exchangeable records. It does not show queues between processors. StreamSets makes debugging easier with its real-time debugging tool. It does not allow leaving disconnected processors.
To learn more about StreamSets, visit here.
Conclusion
In this blog, you went through some of the best CDC tools to implement Change Data Capture. Hand-coding the CDC infrastructure comes with many challenges. It is difficult to manage and reusing code is complex. It also takes a lot of developer bandwidth. It is a lot more efficient to invest in an out-of-the-box tool like Hevo.
Visit our Website to Explore Hevo
Hevo is a no-code platform with an intuitive GUI, it is scalable and can be set up quickly. You can quickly bring your data from various sources to a data warehouse in real-time.
Want to take Hevo for a spin? Sign Up for a 14-day free trial and experience the feature-rich Hevo suite first hand.
Share your thoughts on CDC tools in the comments below!