RE: Data Warehousing books for Oracle 9i (once again)

Rich -

   I don't claim to be a DW expert. My impression is that what you have to do for a DW will vary widely from site to site. Also, much of the work may be done by people besides yourself, and they may elect to use tools besides Oracle.

I would consider a hierarchy of load/update tools to be as follows:

1. ODBC tools
2. Oracle - SQL, PL/SQL, etc.
3. O.S. tools The ODBC tools are the most convenient, and may give okay performance for small amounts of data. You probably won't be using them, so this means someone besides yourself may be doing much of the work. But for large data sets, the performance may not be adequate. For really large amounts of data, you may find it necessary to process data at the O.S. level before you load it into Oracle. For example, you might sort the data before loading it into Oracle. SyncSort makes its money by being faster than Oracle. Updating just adds more complexity and more variety to the tool set. You must select a method based on your situation. Bottom line, use whatever works, and the more tools in your tool chest the better. Next week I plan to make up a list of 9i new features that may be useful for DW, to brief my DW developers. I'll send you the list.

Dennis Williams
DBA
Lifetouch, Inc.
dwilliams_at_lifetouch.com

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Wednesday, November 27, 2002 10:20 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

Yes, I know -- old topic, but a search thru the 440 DW posts on the fatcity archives didn't reveal much.

Not having much of any knowledge on DW/DM, I picked up the Oracle Press' "Oracle8 Data Warehousing" book for $1 on the clearance rack in hopes that an overall view of the procedures necessary for DW/DM building and maintenance to give me some idea of what I'm up against.

I can't help but be completely confused by this book because it doesn't seem to cover DW/DM maintenance at all. It has a chapter dedicated to various ways to populate the DW/DM, but not how to keep the data up-to-date. Do DWs get completely regenerated on a daily/weekly/periodic basis? This just doesn't seem feasible to me, especially for large (1T+) DWs.

Am I missing something? Are newer revs of this book better? Are there any better DW books geared specifically for Oracle9i? Does Martha know that John is really her long-lost brother?

>From past posts (Jared's?), I'm thinking that we'd be at least picking up
Kimball's DW Toolkit, 2nd Ed. and hopefully we'll get some training in for this, too, but I would like something specific to DWs on Oracle 9i.

TIA! :)
Rich

Rich Jesse                           System/Database Administrator
Rich.Jesse_at_qtiworld.com              Quad/Tech International, Sussex, WI USA

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