Oracle DBA Guide to Data Warehousing and Star Schemas [Paperback]

Bert Scalzo (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0130325848 | ISBN-13: 978-0130325846 | Publication Date: June 14, 2003 | Edition: 1

Oracle DBA Guide to Data Warehousing and Star Schemas is the definitiveguide to maximizing the performance, flexibility, and manageability ofany Oracle 8i/9i data warehouse. Legendary Oracle data warehouse expertBert Scalzo offers hard-won lessons and proven techniques for designing,constructing, tuning, and maintaining star schema data warehouses inreal production environments. Coverage includes: planning hardware andsoftware architectures; star schema design; data loading; queryoptimization; partitioning; administration; and much more.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

• The definitive, real-world guide to Oracle data warehousing
• Maximizing performance, flexibility, and manageability in production environments
• Hardware/software architectures, star schema design, partitioning, and more
• Industrial strength data loading and query optimization techniques
• By the world-renowned architect of 7-Eleven's multi-terabyte datawarehouse

Maximize Oracle data warehouse performance, flexibility, and manageability

Oracle DBAs finally have a definitive guide to every aspect of designing, constructing, tuning, and maintaining star schema data warehouses with Oracle 8i and 9i. Bert Scalzo, one of the world's leading Oracle data warehousing experts, offers practical, hard-won lessons and breakthrough techniques for maximizing performance, flexibility, and manageability in any production environment. Coverage includes:

• Data warehousing fundamentals for DBAs--including what a data warehouse isn't
• Planning software architecture: business intelligence, user interfaces, Oracle versions, OS platforms, and more
• Planning hardware architecture: CPUs, memory, disk space, and configuration
• Radically different star schema design for radically improved performance
• Tuning ad-hoc queries for lightning speed Industrial-strength data loading techniques
• Aggregate tables: maximizing performance benefits, minimizing complexity tradeoffs
• Improving manageability: The right ways to partition
• Data warehouse administration: Backup/recovery, space and extent management, updates, patches, and more

About the Author

BERT SCALZO is a product architect for Quest Software. As a member ofthe TOAD development team, he designed many of the features in the TOADDBA module. Scalzo has presented numerous papers on data warehousing andled or served on data warehouse special interest groups at Oracle eventsthroughout the past five years. He has worked for both Oracle Educationand Oracle Consulting, holds several Oracle Masters, a Ph.D. in ComputerScience, an MBA, and several insurance industry designations. Scalzodesigned 7-Eleven's multi-terabyte, star-schema data warehouse. He isauthor of The TOAD Handbook.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall; 1 edition (June 14, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0130325848
• ISBN-13: 978-0130325846
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,332,743 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Pretty good if you can get past the attitude, October 4, 2003

By 

Phillip D. Whittenberg "David Whittenberg" (Bartlett, TN USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Oracle DBA Guide to Data Warehousing and Star Schemas (Paperback)

The book offers a number of detailed tuning tips and insights from Mr. Scalzo's real world experience. That being said, the tone of the writing is really annoying. Mr. Scalzo's condescending style is unnecessary and takes away from what could be a very good book. At points, I actually broke out in laughter at his arrogance. However, if you can get past the author's attitude the content of the book seems to be quite helpful.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Veritable Gold Mine of Practical Hints and Tips!, February 17, 2004

By 

rdiehl (Phoenix, AZ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Oracle DBA Guide to Data Warehousing and Star Schemas (Paperback)

As an Oracle DBA transitioning from the OLTP world to the warehousing arena, I found this book enormously helpful. In a mere 200 pages, Mr. Scalzo has elaborated on an extensive range of data warehousing topics, including: star-schemas, dimension hierarchies, SQL-tuning, partitioning and parallel loading to name a few. His style is informative and direct; his examples are meaningful and clear!

This is a must-have book for all DBA's serious about designing and managing large-scale, lightning-fast data warehousing systems.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Recipe for Success, August 21, 2004

By 

Jim Stagnitto (New Hope, PA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Oracle DBA Guide to Data Warehousing and Star Schemas (Paperback)

Allow me to bestow some well-deserved praise upon Bert Scalzo's terrific "Oracle DBA Guide to Data Warehousing and Star Schemas". A true gem - I won't go on another Oracle project without it.

What Bert provides here is nothing short of a clear and crisp recipe for success for implementing Oracle-based data warehouses. It fills in a much-needed area of dimensional data warehousing best practices, by describing precisely how to coax the best achieveable Oracle performance from dimensional data models.

I can't tell you how many projects I've been on where I've had to compromise physical data models in order to address perceived "shortcomings" in Oracle's ability to efficiently service dimensional queries. Using Bert's book on my most recent project, we followed his "recipe", and were able to consistently achieve the ideal query optimization plans and aggregate navigation behaviors - simply - without any of the usual hassles that I have (unfairly) come to associate with large scale Oracle data warehousing.

To data warehousing newbies I humbly suggest: pick up any one of Ralph Kimball's terrific texts on data warehouse design, and then if you are rendering it in Oracle, buy this book and follow its advice. The resultant system will be simple, powerful, and fast.

Bravo Bert - a great contribution to the field.

Jim Stagnitto
Llumino, Inc (www.llumino.com)