The Extractor reads the transaction logs of the source database system, generates intermediate files, and extracts data changes such as inserts, updates, and deletes for the selected source tables, as defined in the configuration file. The Extractor can also capture some DDL changes. The Extractor writes the changes to intermediate files.
For MySQL sources, the Extractor uses the mysqlbinlog utility to read change events from the binary log.
Usually, you run the Extractor on the source system. However, you can run the Extractor on another system provided that the Extractor can access the transaction logs. For example, an Extractor that runs on Windows can parse transaction logs on an HP-UX source system. Although the Extractor parses source data efficiently, extraction performance also depends on the hardware and I/O speed for accessing transaction logs.