Selecting the right tool for any data problem is never easy — especially something as technically complicated and rife with pitfalls as change data capture (CDC). Navigating through complex features, varying benefits, potential limitations, and most importantly, aligning these factors with your business needs can be an overwhelming task.
This is where today’s guide comes in. In this article, we will analyze 10 best Change Data Capture tools and also show you how each solution can enhance your data management processes. By the time you are done reading this 10-minute guide, you’ll know which of these options is best aligned with your requirements.
10 Change Data Capture Tools For Efficient Data Replication
Here are our top 3 picks for the best CDC tools:
- Estuary Flow - Top Pick
- Debezium - Best Community Support
- Qlik Replicate - Best for accelerating data integration for analytics
Let's take a detailed look at each of the 11 change data capture tools and pick the one that best suits your needs.
Estuary Flow
Estuary Flow is our streaming ETL solution that enables real-time data pipelines connecting various data systems. Unlike traditional ETL platforms, Flow offers an event-driven runtime, allowing true real-time CDC.
When it comes to capturing changes accurately, Estuary Flow shines brightly. Using advanced log-based change data capture techniques, it captures granular data changes at the source to maintain data integrity and reduce latency. Estuary Flow's precise capture mechanism ensures that no change is missed, providing you with a comprehensive and reliable data history.
Flow’s sophisticated filtering options allow you to capture only relevant data changes, further optimizing performance and reducing storage requirements. By using the data source connectors, it acts as a log-driven CDC pipeline that seamlessly captures change events from your databases.
The data is then streamed through the Flow runtime, backed up to a cloud data lake, and efficiently delivered to one or multiple target systems with millisecond latency.
With a simple yet powerful architecture, it provides perfect connectivity to a wide range of data sources and targets. Estuary Flow effortlessly captures real-time data changes from databases, data warehouses, and other sources, ensuring a smooth data flow across your entire ecosystem.
Estuary Flow has a robust and scalable framework that handles data capture requirements of any scale. Its distributed architecture ensures high availability and fault tolerance which allows you to capture data changes continuously without any interruptions. With support for parallel processing, Estuary Flow enables swift and efficient data ingestion even in environments with high data volumes and complex data structures.
Estuary Pricing
Flow offers flexible pricing plans that are based on the amount of data transferred.
- Free: Up to 2 tasks and 10 GB/month
- Cloud ($20/month): Up to 27GB/month for $20 then $0.75/GB
- Enterprise (Custom pricing): For large or custom deployments of Flow
Debezium - Best Community Support
Debezium is one of the finest open-source stream data processing solutions. Developed as a part of the Apache Kafka ecosystem, Debezium has strong community support and collaboration. With a vibrant community behind it, Debezium benefits from continuous improvement, rapid bug fixes, and a wide range of connectors to various databases.
Debezium's core strength lies in its ability to capture and stream changes in real time from database transaction logs. Whether it's powering event-driven architectures, microservices, or enabling real-time data warehousing, Debezium empowers you to make informed decisions based on the most up-to-date information available.
Debezium is built to handle high-throughput scenarios with ease. Leveraging Apache Kafka as its underlying messaging backbone, it delivers exceptional performance and horizontal scalability. It can easily integrate with existing systems and provides comprehensive tooling for DevOps teams.
Debezium provides robust support for capturing and managing schema changes, allowing you to seamlessly evolve your data models without disrupting downstream applications.
Debezium does have a few notable shortcomings, however: for instance, it requires significant expertise and DevOps time, and its handling massive-scale tables is problematic.
Debezium Pricing
Free to use.
Qlik Replicate - Best For Accelerating Data Integration For Analytics
Qlik Replicate is known for its unparalleled efficiency in replicating data. It is designed to capture and transfer data in real time with minimal latency and near-zero impact on the source systems. Qlik Replicate allows you to replicate data from a variety of sources, may it be a database, data warehouse, or cloud platform.
Qlik Replicate provides a high-performance data streaming capability. Whether it's detecting anomalies, monitoring KPIs, or enabling real-time analytics, this tool offers a reliable foundation for you to capitalize on the power of real-time data.
Its intuitive interface and powerful transformation functions allow you to easily modify and enrich data during the replication process. This way, you can harmonize data across different sources, cleanse and validate information, and perform complex data transformations as needed.
Qlik Replicate offers extensive support for a wide range of data sources and targets. Whether you need to replicate data from traditional relational databases, modern NoSQL systems, cloud-based platforms, or mainframe systems, Qlik Replicate effortlessly integrates with these sources.
Qlik Replicate Pricing
Custom pricing plans are available on demand.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) GoldenGate - Ideal For Heterogeneous Environments
Oracle GoldenGate (OGG) stands out as one of the finest change data capture tools. It handles large-scale data operations with exceptional performance. The platform delivers real-time data synchronization capabilities which ensures that your data remains up to date across multiple systems. With its efficient change data capture technology, GoldenGate captures and replicates data changes as they occur, enabling near-instantaneous updates.
OCI GoldenGate provides robust support for heterogeneous environments which makes it a versatile choice for companies with diverse data systems. Regardless of whether your data resides in Oracle databases, non-Oracle databases, or even cloud-based systems, GoldenGate can replicate data across these different platforms.
OCI GoldenGate offers all-inclusive features for high availability and disaster recovery. With its active-active replication capability, GoldenGate can maintain synchronized copies of data across multiple locations to reduce the risk of data loss and provide seamless failover in case of system failures.
To meet the specific needs of different data systems, OCI GoldenGate provides powerful transformation and filtering capabilities. You can customize data replication processes to selectively capture and deliver only the relevant data to target systems.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) GoldenGate Pricing
Pay-as-you-go pricing plans are available on demand.
Talend - Meeting Demands For Best Outcomes
Talend is a comprehensive CDC solution that enables you to capture and propagate changes occurring in various data sources in real time. It seamlessly integrates with other components of the data ecosystem. Talend supports a big list of data platforms like databases, data lakes, cloud platforms, and big data solutions.
Talend integrates with popular data integration tools like SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) to leverage existing investments and enhance your data integration workflows. It goes beyond traditional CDC functionality and offers state-of-the-art data transformation capabilities. With its extensive library of pre-built connectors and transformations, Talend helps you easily:
- Enrich data
- Apply business rules
- Perform data cleansing
- Define complex data mappings
Talend can parallelize data processing tasks, distribute them across multiple nodes, and leverage cloud computing resources to achieve optimal scalability and efficiency. It also provides detailed dashboards, alerting mechanisms, and error-handling functionalities so you can promptly identify and resolve issues during the data integration process.
Talend Pricing
Tailor-made pricing plans are available on demand.
Fivetran - Best-In-Class Security Practices
Fivetran is a data movement platform known for its straightforward setup process. With Fivetran, you can focus on data analysis and strategic decision-making rather than grappling with complex technicalities.
Fivetran has an extensive library of over 200 pre-built connectors. Whether you need to capture transactional data from popular databases like Oracle, MySQL, or PostgreSQL or connect to cloud-based systems like Salesforce, Amazon Redshift, or Google BigQuery, Fivetran has the connector for you. And since their 2021 acquisition of HVR, they support CDC in addition to batch data pipelines.
Fivetran's architecture is designed for scalability and its cloud-native approach enables elastic scalability so that the system can effortlessly adapt to varying workloads and accommodate increased transactional data ingestion.
Fivetran offers strict security measures, including encryption in transit and at rest, to keep the data protected throughout the replication process. Additionally, Fivetran complies with industry-leading security standards like SOC 2 Type II and GDPR.
Fivetran Pricing
Fivetran provides custom pricing plans based on a pay-as-you-go model.
Striim Cloud - Ideal For Mission-Critical Data Workflow
Striim Cloud is a fully managed data streaming platform available on AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. It supports over 100 connectors for seamless integration of various data sources. Airbyte goes above and beyond with a remarkable 99.5% uptime guarantee so that your data is captured and delivered in real time without any delays.
One of its key features is its use of change data capture technology for real-time ETL workflows that ensure up-to-date information. Built on a distributed streaming SQL platform, Striim Cloud has support for continuous queries, real-time analytics, and scalable processing of billions of events per minute.
Striim Cloud Pricing
- Striim Developer (Free): For 10 million events/month
- Data Product Solutions ($4,400/month): For 100 million events/month
- Striim Cloud Enterprise ($4,400/month): For 100 million events/month
Precisely Connect - Most Flexible
Precisely Connect is another powerful data integration tool that enables seamless access and collection of data across various sources and targets. It offers both batch and real-time ingestion capabilities that allows for advanced analytics, machine learning, and data migration.
It has excellent support for different data types and platforms, including:
- RDBMS
- Big data
- Mainframes
- Cloud platforms
- Streaming platforms
- Semi-structured data
- Enterprise data warehouses
This broad range of support ensures comprehensive connectivity for ETL and change data capture (CDC) requirements. With its flexible mapping interface, you can effortlessly define complex transformations to meet specific business requirements. It is designed to handle high-volume data streams and effortlessly scales to accommodate growing data volumes and spikes in data ingestion rates.
Precisely Connect Pricing
Pricing plans are available on demand.
Equalum - Most Diverse
Equalum is a log-based CDC tool that excels in continuous data integration and real-time ETL streaming. It offers a fully managed solution with enterprise-grade capabilities with unlimited scalability and minimal system impact.
Equalum supports high throughput data replication and streaming ETL with real-time CDC extraction from numerous sources. Its modern CDC features, including a binary log parser, automatic schema evolution, and exactly-once guarantee, contribute to its effectiveness and reliability. One of the key advantages of Equalum is its user-friendly deployment which allows you to deploy data pipelines in just minutes.
Equalum Pricing
Custom pricing plans are available on demand.
Arcion - Trusted By Fortune 500 Companies
Arcion is yet another highly scalable and reliable CDC tool that is trusted by leading Fortune 500 companies. Its no-code platform enables fast data injection for real-time decision-making while robust data pipelines ensure high availability.
Arcion provides support for a variety of CDC techniques, such as log-based, delta-based, and checksum-based methods. It effectively manages both DML and non-DML changes. Additionally, it offers features like schema evolution, column transformation, and DDL support, enabling flexible data management.
Arcion's intuitive UI allows for easy setup and configuration, requiring no custom code. It has extensive documentation, tutorials, blogs, and customer support further enhancing the user experience.
Arcion Pricing
You can contact Arcion’s support team for personalized quotes.
As you get familiarized with the importance of Change Data Capture, the question arises: Why opt for CDC tools instead of building an in-house CDC process? Let’s discuss this.
Do We Really Need A CDC Tool?
Here are a few drawbacks of developing a DIY CDC solution uncovering the reasons why dependable CDC tools are a must:
- Complexity: Implementing CDC data replication involves handling challenges like diverse database providers, varying record formats, and accessing log records, making it a complex task.
- Overburdening Developers: Building an in-house CDC solution adds to the workload of developers already busy with projects, potentially impacting their focus on revenue-generating tasks.
- Regular Maintenance: Developing a custom CDC solution requires writing and maintaining scripts as databases and log patterns change. This ongoing maintenance consumes significant time and resources.
Conclusion
To reap the benefits of CDC, you need a change data capture tool that not only aligns with your data management needs but also scales effortlessly and fits comfortably within your budget. Each alternative we've explored carries its unique strengths and specializations.
Upgrading to the right CDC tool can make a world of difference in your data management practices. It can enhance data visibility, bolster security, ensure compliance, and optimize overall performance.
So if you are on the lookout for a tool that's easy to use and requires minimal upkeep, Estuary Flow is your best bet. With its advanced feature set, intuitive interface, and scalability, it provides the essential tools to streamline your data integration tasks efficiently. Sign up now or get in touch to learn more about how we can help.
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