Book Image

Oracle Warehouse Builder 11g R2: Getting Started 2011

Book Image

Oracle Warehouse Builder 11g R2: Getting Started 2011

Overview of this book

In today's economy, businesses and IT professionals cannot afford to lag behind the latest technologies. Data warehousing is a critical area to the success of many enterprises, and Oracle Warehouse Builder is a powerful tool for building data warehouses. It comes free with the latest version of the Oracle database.Written in an accessible, informative, and focused manner, this book will teach you to use Oracle Warehouse Builder to build your data warehouse. Covering warehouse design, the import of source data, the ETL cycle and more, this book will have you up and running in next to no time.This book will walk you through the complete process of planning, building, and deploying a data warehouse using Oracle Warehouse Builder. By the book's end, you will have built your own data warehouse from scratch.Starting with the installation of the Oracle Database and Warehouse Builder software, this book then covers the analysis of source data, designing a data warehouse, and extracting, transforming, and loading data from the source system into the data warehouse. You'll follow the whole process with detailed screenshots of key steps along the way that have all been updated for the new Fusion Client Platform interface in 11gR2, alongside numerous tips and hints not covered by the official documentation. You’ll finish up with a brand new chapter on code templates where you’ll implement a complete mapping using JDBC connectivity and code template mappings.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Oracle Warehouse Builder 11gR2: Getting Started 2011
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 2. Defining and Importing Source Data Structures

The Warehouse Builder software and Oracle database have been installed, and we're ready to begin building our data warehouse. The first thing we have to do is define what our sources of data will be. If we are going to build a useful data warehouse, we have to know what kinds of information our users are going to need out of the warehouse. To know that, we have to know the following:

  • The format in which the data is currently stored and where it is stored.

  • Whether there is a transactional database currently in use or not, which supports day-to-day operations and from which we'll be pulling the data.

    A transactional database is different from a data warehouse database in that it is designed to support the day-to-day transactions that keep an organization running.

  • Whether the database is an Oracle database or another vendor's database such as Microsoft SQL Server.

  • Whether there are any flat files of information saved from database tables or...