Book Image

Oracle Warehouse Builder 11g: Getting Started

By : Bob Griesemer
Book Image

Oracle Warehouse Builder 11g: Getting Started

By: Bob Griesemer

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, alongside numerous tips and hints not covered by the official documentation.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Oracle Warehouse Builder 11 Getting Started
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Data warehouse design


When it comes to the design of a data warehouse, there is basically one option that makes the most sense for how we will structure our database and that is the dimensional model. This is a way of looking at the data from a business perspective that makes the data simple, understandable, and easy to query for the business end user. It doesn't require a database administrator to be able to retrieve data from it.

When looking at the source databases in the last chapter, we saw a normalized method of modelling a database. A normalized model removes redundancies in data by storing information in discrete tables, and then referencing those tables when needed. This has an advantage for a transactional system because information needs to be entered at only one place in the database, without duplicating any information already entered. For example, in the ACME Toys and Gizmos transactional database, each time a transaction is recorded for the sale of an item at a register, a...