Can GoldenGate replicate to previous versions of the same vendor?

I’ve seen it done on Oracle before like replicating 11 -> 10 or 11->9. The intermediate format for GoldenGate has been standard forever, so as long as you have GG binaries certified to connect to each database then theoretically it should be possible to get them to interact with these intermediate files and extract or replicate as needed.

But there are limitations:
• If it is a very old DB then Oracle/GG may have GG binaries available for download but they may be out of support. So if everything works fine, great. If something goes wrong then support may be limited. Check the certification matrix for Fusion Middleware to see what versions of GG are supported and which versions of the target databases they talk to.
• If source and target schema structure are the same this ends up being a lot easier.
• If they are different then someone (DBA team or ETL team) needs to take responsibility for the mappings between source and target schemas.
Whoever takes responsibility then takes blame for anything that might go wrong with replication… even if it’s a GG bug or the like.
• If they are slightly different (table names, column names, data types) then usually not a problem.
• If they are wildly different (data has to be merged or split between tables to respect the target DB’s relational model) then we have to write custom actions to handle this data. Gets risky and complex, see previous bullet point for “blame”.
• GG doesn’t support all data types, character sets, or operations, limits are outlined here for MySQL or Oracle. Check documentation here for other vendor's products.

GoldenGate is a powerful tool but don't skip your due diligence in order to make sure what you want to do is officially supported.