Oracle GoldenGate and Compressed Tables

OGG does not support compressed tables or partitions, neither does it handle it well with proper error messages until OGG v10.4. The abends may or may not produce any error message and sometimes produce wrong messages.

From V11.1.1.0.0, Oracle has enhanced the error handling part in BugDB 9425542, which gives meaningful error message on the compressed record before Extract abend. It will list out the table name, rowid, etc

Example :
ERROR OGG-01028 Record on table QATEST1.TAB1 with rowid AAM4EkAAEAACBguAAA from transaction 5.24.270123 (0x0005.018.00041f2b) is compressed. Compression is not supported.

However, due to bug 10063108, sometimes the error message on compressed tables are not entirely correct. This problem has been fixed in 11.1.1.0.3 and above

A table created as compressed will cause all of the DML’s to go into compressed blocks on disk. If the user does an "alter table nocompress", every DML that goes into the table AFTER that point in time will be uncompressed. The query for compression will return "nocompress" now, but the simple "alter" does not change the already existing compressed blocks on disk that were created before the "alter". So to capture the records from a table which was compressed we need to do the following

SQL> alter table move nocompress;

This will touch every single block on disk and will uncompress everything thereby causing OGG to work properly and not abend.

If there is even a single partition in a partitioned table that is compressed, it will cause an abend. Partition compression can be verified by getting the full DDL for the table by running the DBMS_METADATA.GET_DDL package. For table partitions that are compressed, run the below query and get the partition names & tablespace names.

SQL> SELECT partition_name, subpartition_name, tablespace_name, high_value FROM user_tab_subpartitions WHERE table_name = 'table_name';

Alter statement for partition to move to nocompress:

SQL> ALTER TABLE MOVE PARTITION NOCOMPRESS TABLESPACE ;

Eensure that you have enough disk space within your tablespaces before running the ALTER statement.

Support of compressed tables will be in future releases of OGG, however, in current V10.4 and V11.1.1.x, the only option, if a "move nocompress" is not possible, is to comment the compressed table or exclude them from the Extract.