Customer Reviews

Oracle Data Warehouse Tuning for 10g

5 star:		(4)
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2 star:		(1)
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This is probably the only book, and best book I have seen on
Data Warehouse tuning. Mr Powell has done a very good job in
clearly explaining some of the oracle features frequently used in a Data Warehouse like Star Queries, Star Query Transformations, Materialized Views, Dimensions objects. He has given very practical hints and performance recommendation as to when to use some of these features and how they can be tuned. The best thing I liked whether you are a new/intermediate/advanced developer/DBA, the book is loaded with examples showing how small changes affect the cost of some queries using oracle built in explain plan features. Other good feature of the book is the most of topics covered like Bitmap Indexing, Materialized view, etc. he has explained the potential pitfalls of those features and when not to use them, giving the developer/architect of the Data Warehouse system to help choosing proper design/implementation.

He has also covered the partioning and parallel processing a very essential for data warehouse tuning, however you may find this particular topic in other books.

The new features like model clause and how optimizer rewrites the query are well explained. Loading and extraction a key portion of Data Warehouse Architecture is covered.
He does cover the Tuning Hardware Resources of Data Warehousing, but as the author mentions in the preface he gives lot better information on tuning the application/query and architecture in the book rather than tuning the hardware underneath and if we use those concepts correctly tuning of hardware resources should be the last thing we may have to do.
Where ever needed he has explained how this feature is behaved in 10g and sometimes compared with previous version.
I do like and agree with his tuning approach and intutively used it myself at my job all the time, where I tune my database application on a low grade machine where resources are not state of the art, where I can see maximum benefit of my tuning, rather than tuning my application on high grade machine where my application's performance shortcoming will be hidden. I think this book will be very useful for data modeler/developers/DBA or whoever is already using Data Warehouse application or are planning to use/develop a Data Warehouse system. I thank Mr Powell for sharing the knowledge and experience he has gained in this field with other developers/DBAs etc.

I bought this book with the expectation that the author would be able to provide some insight. I was wrong. This books does explain Concepts and Example of DW. This books is good if your just getting into DW. It would better to download the Oracle Concepts Guide and the DW Guide.

I love this book. Whether you are advanced or a beginner, you can utilize the information in these pages.

The beginning tends to be basic to help the non DW DBA's understand DW concepts. The Author then gets into the meat of the book with great examples.

Some of the information explained within:

Dimensions and Dimension Objects
MV And Query Rewrite
Partitioning
Parallel Processing
Bitmap Indexes
Bitmap Join Indexes
DW Data Modeling
Effective DW Indexing
Optmization of Data Loading
SQL and MODEL clause
Snowflake versus Star Schemas
Star Transformations

and much much more. The author also explains the pros and cons as well as pitfalls of each approach.

If you want a book that gives you the What, how, and most importantly why. Then I would highly recommend this book. It costs more than other books, but I don't regret it as I feel it's worth every cent and more.

Data warehousing is not a simple subject; in this book, Mr.Powell guides you in a simple and interesting way with lots of examples and hints, through the intricacies of real-world data warehousing and how to get the most of your 10g data warehouse.

It goes deep into how to tune from the data model to the SQL coding, to the data loading methods, with a throughput goal in mind.

I appreciate the book. Through reading the book, I think the readers will know to handle some real data warehouse issues.