What’s New in Striim v. 3.9.7

In the last few months, the Striim Team launched two new releases: 3.9.6, and more recently, 3.9.7.  Before I go into the details…

Did you know that Striim…? 

• • enables bi-directional data flows for phased, live cloud migrations as part of data modernization.

  • supports Azure Synapse Analytics.

  • supports the Cosmos DB Cassandra API to provide more options to connect Cosmos DB with other systems.

  • provides an Incremental Batch Reader for Google Cloud Spanner to integrate its data with other Google Cloud services in a timely manner.

  • enables commit timestamp propagation for Google Cloud Spanner to enable change-based streaming data flows from the Cloud Spanner database.

  • offers real-time data ingestion from a MariaDB Galera cluster to support customers’ high-availability solutions.

  • enhanced its JMS Reader for broker-side acknowledgments for additional event processing guarantees.

  • enhanced its FileReader to automatically generate output streams based on headers, improving ease of use.

With this overview, we can dig into the key new features that these releases introduced. At the high level, we can summarize the goals of these releases as:

• Accelerating data migration to the cloud and enabling true hybrid cloud architecture with robust bidirectional replication, now including loop detection
• Enhancing cloud adoption solutions with added support for additional real-time data ingestion and delivery capabilities
• High-availability, reliability, and performance-related enhancements for end-to-end streaming data integration solutions

Let’s start with the bi-directional replication offering with a new loop detection feature that streamlines phased cloud migration solutions.

Bi-Directional Replication to Enable Hybrid Cloud Architectures and Minimize Risks with a Phased Cloud Migration

Data migration is one of the key challenges in transforming critical business systems to run on the cloud. Striim helps leading enterprises transform their business operations by simplifying cloud adoption and maintaining a connected hybrid cloud architecture. By continuously moving data from legacy systems to cloud databases in real-time, Striim eliminates database downtime and minimizes business disruption for data migration. With Striim’s bidirectional replication capabilities that include the new loop detection feature, you can now seamlessly move your applications to the cloud environment in a phased manner and further minimize risks. 

With bi-directional replication, the changes occurring in the cloud databases are applied to the legacy database, while the changes happening in the legacy database continue to be delivered to the cloud database to keep them in synch. The loop detection feature recognizes which changes occur due to the replication function versus the application transactions writing to the source database. This bi-directional configuration allows a phased migration, where a portion of your application users use the legacy system, and the rest use the new cloud system. You can decide the speed in which users transition to the new environment. If the new system is not ready for production use, you also have the fallback option to move all users back to the legacy database. Striim version 3.9.7 offers bi-directional replication for Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB databases. 

Using the bi-directional replication configuration across heterogeneous databases, you can minimize your cloud migration risks with:

• Zero database downtime, 
• Zero data loss via continuous data validation,
• The ability to test the new environment without time restrictions,
• The fallback option to the old environment after the switchover, if the new environment has any issues.

When such critical migration hurdles are removed, you can rapidly tap into the power of a modern cloud environment and transform your business operations to the fullest degree possible.

Bi-directional replication is not limited to data migration use cases, and supports post-migration hybrid cloud architecture as well. Businesses that have applications running on-premises and in the cloud using disparate databases can also use bi-directional replication on an ongoing basis to keep their databases in-sync.

Boosting Cloud Integration Solution with Improved Real-Time Data Ingestion and Delivery 

Striim continues to invest in its cloud integration solution with enhancements to the out-of-the-box adapters that connect with the leading cloud services. The latest releases introduce the following new features:

• • Support for Cassandra API for real-time data delivery to Azure Cosmos DB to provide Cosmos DB users more options for connecting Cosmos DB with other services and data environments in real-time.
  • Support for real-time data delivery to Azure Synapse Analytics.

• • Certification for Azure SQL Database Managed Instance to enable SQL Server and Azure SQL Database customers to use Striim when moving their critical workloads to Azure.
  • Ability to capture low-latency data from Google Cloud Spanner tables in incremental mode to share the data with other Google Cloud services in a timely manner.

• • Enhancements to Azure Event Hubs Writer and S3 writer to broaden data security configurations.
  • Further improvements to Google Cloud Pub/Sub Writer’s reliability in supporting high data volumes.

Enhancements for High-availability, Reliability, Security and Performance of the End-to-End Solutions

Enabling and supporting high-availability, reliability, and security of our customers’ end-to-end solutions has been our key differentiator from day one. So, the following new features are part of our efforts to continue to make Striim an enterprise-grade offering for mission-critical environments:

• • Striim now offers the ability to read changed data from, and write to, MariaDB Galera cluster environments in real-time. This means: MariaDB customers that choose to boosts their high-availability with the Galera cluster solution can seamlessly share real-time data with other on-premises and cloud solutions using Striim.
  • With broker side acknowledgments, Striim enhanced its JMS Reader for additional event processing guarantees. Striim groups messages as transactions at the broker level and tracks their full delivery before removing them from the queue to guarantee every message is processed. 
  • Striim further improves data security by supporting AES-256 encryption for data-in-motion.
  • A powerful feature of Striim: capturing real-time data from Oracle GoldenGate Trail Files, is also enhanced. Striim can ingest real-time data from GoldenGate version 18.1 and supports an extended list of data types to help GoldenGate customers distribute the data coming to GoldenGate to an extensive list of additional destinations in real-time.
  • Striim’s FileReader improves ease of use by automatically creating the output streams based on the header information.
  • Striim’s database writer has also been enhanced to increase initial load performance.

You can find more detailed information about Striim’s new features in the documentation for 3.9.7 and 3.9.6, respectively. You may also like to download a free trial of Striim’s latest version or reach out to us to see a customized demo for your specific environment.