Warehouse Builder

Hello,

I am interested in any comments/opinions people may have regarding Oracle Warehouse Builder. We currently use Designer as a modeling/metadata tool, but as you know, Designer has been frozen, and we are considering replacement tools.

Our environment is a 600GB (and growing) Oracle 9.2 data warehouse on Solaris; we are planning an upgrade to 10g, probably when 10g Release 2 + 1st patchset comes out.

At present, developers use Designer to model normalized and denormalized systems; the metadata is reviewed and approved, and DDL is generated from Designer. (We don't use the Forms/Reports generators.) The ETL code is written in pl/sql packages. Our major data sources are flat files and Oracle/SqlServer databases; Cognos tools are used for cubes and adhoc reports.

Questions with Oracle Warehouse Builder:

1) How would you rate the learning curve for this tool?
2) How would you compare this to Designer as a modeling tool?
3) How would you compare this to Designer as a metadata tool?
4) How would you rate the quality of generated ETL code from OWB?

• How much customization of code do you add? 5) How easy is it to keep the OWB repository metadata up-to-date? (Any issues with reverse-engineering metadata from Oracle's data dictionary?) 6) How easy is it to write reports against OWB's metadata repository? 7) Can this be used as a "data architect" tool? (however you choose to define that) 8) Any other issues? (pricing, performance, etc.)

Any other comments/opinions are welcome. Thanks to any responders.    

--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l