That's it. We've gone through the install process of the Oracle 11g database. It automatically installs the Warehouse Builder components as well as the OWBSYS database user. We've also gone through a standalone installation of the OWB client on a separate workstation and have run Repository Assistant to configure our first workspace. We've also discussed the architecture of the Warehouse Builder components as they are now installed on our system. OWB is now installed and ready to use, so we can begin our project of designing and installing a data warehouse.

The general process we're going to follow throughout the rest of the book to actually build our data warehouse is to start by defining our data sources—where we will import the data from. We will import or define definitions of those sources, so that the Warehouse Builder knows about them. Then we will define our target data structures—where we will be loading data into during ETL and validate those structures. They will have to be generated and deployed to the target schema, which is the process of building the target. After that, comes the process of designing and implementing our ETL to load the target from the sources.

Now that we have the software and database loaded, it's time to begin by defining our sources of data.