Essential Oracle8i Data Warehousing: Designing, Building, and Managing Oracle Data Warehouses

by Tim Gorman and Gary Dodge

Book Overview

"This book is the definitive guide for serious Oracle8i professionals and is required reading for all Oracle data warehousing practitioners."-Shannon Platz, Senior Director, Business Intelligence &... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0471376787
• ISBN13: 9780471376781
• Release Date: September 2000
• Publisher: Wiley
• Length: 928 Pages
• Weight: 3.47 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.0" x 7.5" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Still the best book on Oracle data warehousing

I have a ton of Oracle DW books and this one is still the gold standard for real world administration of large Oracle data warehouses. The others just plain suck because they lack details or have tons of errors. This along with Bert Scalzo's short DW book for Oracle and the older Oracle 8i Data Warehouse book by Oracle Press written by M. Corey and Abbey are still the best ones on the market.

Practical advice from the Oracle Experts

Uses clear examples to demonstrate the best techniques for designing, building and administering efficient data warehouse solutions using Oracle. This book will give you the information you need to make your data warehouse successful. I wish I could give it more than 5 stars.

Great coverage of the essentials

This book has everything: a brief, high-level, overview of oracle "concepts" like background processes, sga, init parameters, etc. and, ultimately, as its name implies, a good, solid overview of 8i features, tools, and enhancements to make designing, loading, monitoring, and querying large Oracle databases (I think the term "data warehouse" is something of a misnomer) almost, well, FUN. I highly recommend it over Oracle's own, fragmented, documentation and immediately proceeded to partition my large, date-stamped, tables. Mr. Dodge, et al, have raised the bar for successful database projects. Kudos all around.

Highly recommended

I am a veteran Oracle DW designer and tuning specialist. This is a great book - very easy to read, technically accurate, and comprehensive (an unusual combination!). I can say from experience that the emphasis is in the right places. The Oracle manuals tell you how to do things - this tells you what to do and why. I highly recommend it for any Oracle DBA involved in building a data warehouse.

Read this book before you start building DW on Oracle!

I found excellent description of this book in Bill Inmon's Foreword - it's written in comprehensible and down-to-earth manner. Both authors, on top of having real world experience on the subject, are also experienced trainers, so it's not a surprise that this book is readable and well organized at the same time.First three chapters cover essentials in data warehousing, hardware architecture, and introduction to Oracle architecture and features. If you are not familiar with either concept, then you'll be glad that you choose this book just for the first three chapters alone!Next four chapters are about designing data warehouse (metadata, star schema,...), building, populating and post-load processing in the data warehouse. If you already have some experience in Oracle8i, then you'll find most techniques described here very familiar (SQL*Plus, SQL*loader, ...) and occasionally even tedious to read. However some tips are really good and worth some patient while reading. Even if you use particular technique on a daily basis, I'm sure, you'll get some new ideas about different possibilities in data warehouse implementation. Next four chapters are covering administration of data warehouse, performance tuning, parallel execution and parallel server. As DBA I liked these chapters the most. Especially chapter on tuning is well presented with just enough detail that you can start exploring the wonders of Oracle RDBMS.Last two chapters are about distributing the Oracle data warehouse (replication, database links,...) and analytical processing (new analytical functions and brief discussion on Discoverer and OLAP with Oracle Express - the product that will soon die).What about the shortcomings of the book? First, you should visit publisher web site and pick errata for the book (btw, it's excellent). In addition to common typos found in most technical books, some sentences doesn't make sense to me, or contradict with some other part of the book. Next, some pictures are over simplistic and as such unnecessary or hard to understand. In general I like the way authors compared features of different version of Oracle through out the book, however sometimes it's obvious that their focus is not Oracle8i, but previous version of Oracle (for example, it's OK to discuss how to set up SORT_DIRECT_WRITES, but only with the reminder to the reader that this parameter is obsolete in Oracle8i).One last reminder, this is *not* all-in one book, it's about essentials and it should be used as roadmap to different Oracle8i features. There is no substitute for official Oracle manuals (you should at least read Oracle Data Warehousing Guide). If you're experienced Oracle DBA/developer, with several years of hands-on experience in data warehousing you'll probably be disappointed with technical details in this book. This is actually a feature of this book, because you already have all technical manuals, you don't need another one. What you probably don't have is 'essential' book lik