Customer Reviews

Oracle9iR2 Data Warehousing

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I found this book to be an excellent source on contemporary Oracle DW. Within relatively small volume (under 500 pages) the authors have managed to present a fairly comprehensive coverage of the most important Oracle DW topics including OLAP, Discoverer,etc. Practical examples in this book have strong educational value. To me, educational is the keyword: the example schema in the book is called EASYDW, not the terabyte DW. I've happened to be strongly disagreed with those reviewers who based on their personal DW experience claim that the book examples are not from the "Real World" pointing, in particular, to: rolling up City to County. Who in the real world does that? I do. In my environment (Tax Analysis DW), that's exactly what is taking place: we are rolling up the sales in individual cities to the county level because Taxation Authority is the county privilege all over the US, not the individual city's one. Overall I strongly recommend this book. Reading Oracle documentation (like it's suggested by someone above) is not a bad idea in general. However I'm sure it will take you much, much longer to cover the same scope of materials, and at the end, you'll have to put all pieces together by yourself. To me, the value of this book is that it serves as a single, solid source on the wide variety of Oracle DW issues involved in practical DW implementation.

The book doesn't provide details required to really understand the various topics. There is no critical mass and touches all the topics. Just stick with the classics - expert one on one oracle by Tom Kyte,Essential Oracle8i Data Warehousing by Gary Dodge and Tim Gorman, you get much more. If one wants oracle9i specific features, go with oracle 9i new features by Robert Freeman.

In this book, the authors take you swiftly and thoroughly through the entire process of creating a data warehouse. Several other books (I purchased 4 others before this) over-generalize the topic, teaching the vocabulary and business reasons for data warehousing. This book teaches how to implement a warehouse in Oracle 9i Revision 2, while teaching the major concepts through practical application.

It would be easy to get bogged down in the technical details of this book if one were not familiar with the Oracle environment. Those who are familiar with Oracle will find it is much like the courses offered by Oracle. The book consistently, clearly presents the concepts (dimensions, fact tables, summaries, ETL) then delves into such depth it leaves the reader with a complete understanding of not only how to implement each concept, but when, and why to implement them.

The major concepts covered include dimensional modeling, data partitioning, query optimization, materialized views, dimensions, the extract-transform-load process, warehousing tools, ongoing warehouse maintenance, and many more. Furthermore, SQL for the examples used in the book is available from one of the authors websites, affording the reader a hands-on environment in which to observe these concepts.

Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone looking to work with warehousing who already has a firm Oracle background (strong knowledge of schemas, data dictionary, storage conventions, terminology.) This is simply the best book I have found on data warehousing.

I just finished first 4 chapters of the book. The book could have been better titled some thing other than Data Warehousing. Some of the examples & comments in the book are misleading. Like single CPU machines are good to DATAMARTs. In the book it is mentioned BJI are faster. I think BJ are better than BJI on partationed tables, Some wrong example like City rolling up to the County (Please give some Real world examples please?). In one of the screen on summary advisor the example talks about 280% gain by adding MV utilizing 55K. I am prety sure this was not the DW environment on which this sumary management was done. I would sujjest the ORACLE DBA-Guide to Data warehousing Star Schema over this book. Or use the Oracle documentation Part NO A96520-01.

While I won't use terms like "spaghetti" as in other reviewers commnets, I do agree with their sentiments. Not since the Gary Dodge book has there been anything of detailed substance on data warehousing. While I've attended some of Dr. Hobbs' excellent presentations and find her to be the best DW experts out there (even more so than Kimbal since he's not an Oracle guy), there is always more room to dive into details. Thus I wrote a book you can also find on Amazon titled "Oracle DBA Guide to Data Warehousing and Star Schemas". I'm no Dodge or Hobbs, so I merely reveal my DBA experiences on detailed DBA topics from building multi-terabyte Data warehouses. I assume you know the 50,000 foot level stuff and now need a cook book on what to do in the trenches. Worth a look see ...

While I won't use terms like "spaghetti" as in other reviewers commnets, I do agree with their sentiments. Not since the Gary Dodge book has there been anything of detailed substance on data warehousing. While I've attended some of Dr. Hobbs' excellent presentations and find her to be the best DW experts out there (even more so than Kimbal since he's not an Oracle guy), there is always more room to dive into details. Thus I wrote a book you can also find on Amazon titled "Oracle DBA Guide to Data Warehousing and Star Schemas". I'm no Dodge or Hobbs, so I merely reveal my DBA experiences on detailed DBA topics from building multi-terabyte Data warehouses. I assume you know the 50,000 foot level stuff and now need a cook book on what to do in the trenches. Worth a look see ...