One of the most powerful features of the multidimensional engine behind analytic workspaces is the ability to create formulas. Formulas, or "calculated measures" as they're referred to in AWM10g, are measures that are derived from other measures. Using AWM, you can create simple formulas that reference other measures in a cube, allowing you for example to create a "margin" measure derived from sales and costs measures. If you're an old Express hand though, you'll know that this simple type of formulas is just the tip of the iceberg, and what you often used to end up doing was creating for example a three dimensional formula based on measures from four and five dimensional variables, rolling up unneeded dimensions and pulling in variables held in what would now be referred to as "cubes".

I've recently been reading Bert Scalzo's "Oracle DBAs Guide To Data Warehousing And Star Schemas", and he's got an interesting take on the ETL process that I thought it worth looking at in more detail.

With the recent release of Oracle Database 10g, OTN have recently been running a series of articles by Arup Nanda entitled "Oracle Database 10g: The Top 20 Features for DBAs".

With this in mind, I thought it worth putting something similar but this time focusing on those features that apply to Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence. So here's my Top 10...