Oracle recommends that CDC is configured and started before the initial load. This enables change synchronization to keep track of ongoing transactional changes while the load is being applied—a very useful feature when you cannot afford for your source system to be taken offline. In fact, GoldenGate can manage and combine the online transactional changes and the initial data extract with ease, ensuring no data loss or downtime.

So, let's now take a look at the steps required to configure and start CDC in the Oracle 12c multitenant container database environment. After this, we will look at the same for an Oracle database configured in the noncontainer database architecture.