Preface

This manual provides information about Oracle's data warehousing capabilities.

This preface contains these topics:

• Audience

• Organization

• Related Documentation

• Conventions

• Documentation Accessibility

  
  

  Note: The Oracle Data Warehousing Guide contains information that describes the features and functionality of the Oracle Database Standard Edition, Oracle Database Enterprise Edition, and Oracle Database Personal Edition products. These products have the same basic features. However, several advanced features are available only with the Oracle Database Enterprise Edition or Oracle Database Personal Edition, and some of these are optional. For example, to create partitioned tables and indexes, you must have the Oracle Database Enterprise Edition or Oracle Database Personal Edition.

  
  

Audience

This guide is intended for database administrators, system administrators, and database application developers who design, maintain, and use data warehouses.

To use this document, you need to be familiar with relational database concepts, basic Oracle server concepts, and the operating system environment under which you are running Oracle.

Organization

This document contains:

This chapter contains an overview of data warehousing concepts.

This chapter discusses the logical design of a data warehouse.

This chapter discusses the physical design of a data warehouse.

This chapter describes hardware, input-output, and storage considerations.

This chapter describes the basics of parallelism and partitioning in data warehouses.

This chapter describes how to use indexes in data warehouses.

This chapter describes how to use integrity constraints in data warehouses.

This chapter introduces basic materialized views concepts.

This chapter describes how to use materialized views in data warehouses.

This chapter describes how to use dimensions in data warehouses.

This chapter is an overview of the ETL process.

This chapter describes extraction issues.

This chapter describes transporting data in data warehouses.

This chapter describes transforming and loading data in data warehouses.

This chapter describes how to refresh a data warehouse.

This chapter describes how to use Change Data Capture capabilities.

This chapter describes how to use the SQLAccess Advisor.

This chapter describes how to use query rewrite.

This chapter describes the schemas useful in data warehousing environments.

This chapter explains how to use SQL aggregation in data warehouses.

This chapter explains how to use analytic functions in data warehouses.

This chapter explains how to use the spreadsheet clause for SQL modeling.

This chapter describes using analytic services and data mining in combination with Oracle Database10g.

This chapter describes how to tune data warehouses using parallel execution.

The glossary defines important terms used in this guide.

Related Documentation

For more information, see these Oracle resources:

• Oracle Database Performance Tuning Guide

Many of the examples in this book use the sample schemas of the seed database, which is installed by default when you install Oracle. Refer to Oracle Database Sample Schemas for information on how these schemas were created and how you can use them yourself.

Printed documentation is available for sale in the Oracle Store at

http://oraclestore.oracle.com/

To download free release notes, installation documentation, white papers, or other collateral, please visit the Oracle Technology Network (OTN). You must register online before using OTN; registration is free and can be done at

http://otn.oracle.com/membership/

If you already have a username and password for OTN, then you can go directly to the documentation section of the OTN Web site at

http://otn.oracle.com/documentation

For additional information, see:

• The Data Warehouse Toolkit by Ralph Kimball (John Wiley and Sons, 1996)

• Building the Data Warehouse by William Inmon (John Wiley and Sons, 1996)

Conventions

This section describes the conventions used in the text and code examples of this documentation set. It describes:

• Conventions in Text

• Conventions in Code Examples

We use various conventions in text to help you more quickly identify special terms. The following table describes those conventions and provides examples of their use.

Code examples illustrate SQL, PL/SQL, SQL*Plus, or other command-line statements. They are displayed in a monospace (fixed-width) font and separated from normal text as shown in this example:

SELECT username FROM dba_users WHERE username = 'MIGRATE';

The following table describes typographic conventions used in code examples and provides examples of their use.

[ ]

DECIMAL (digits [ , precision ])

{ }

{ENABLE | DISABLE}

|

{ENABLE | DISABLE}
[COMPRESS | NOCOMPRESS]

...

CREATE TABLE ... AS subquery;

SELECT col1, col2, ... , coln FROM employees;

.
 .
 .

SQL> SELECT NAME FROM V$DATAFILE;
NAME
------------------------------------
/fsl/dbs/tbs_01.dbf
/fs1/dbs/tbs_02.dbf
.
.
.
/fsl/dbs/tbs_09.dbf
9 rows selected.

acctbal NUMBER(11,2);
acct    CONSTANT NUMBER(4) := 3;

Italics

CONNECT SYSTEM/system_password
DB_NAME = database_name

UPPERCASE

SELECT last_name, employee_id FROM employees;
SELECT * FROM USER_TABLES;
DROP TABLE hr.employees;

lowercase

SELECT last_name, employee_id FROM employees;
sqlplus hr/hr
CREATE USER mjones IDENTIFIED BY ty3MU9;

Documentation Accessibility

Our goal is to make Oracle products, services, and supporting documentation accessible, with good usability, to the disabled community. To that end, our documentation includes features that make information available to users of assistive technology. This documentation is available in HTML format, and contains markup to facilitate access by the disabled community. Standards will continue to evolve over time, and Oracle is actively engaged with other market-leading technology vendors to address technical obstacles so that our documentation can be accessible to all of our customers. For additional information, visit the Oracle Accessibility Program Web site at

http://www.oracle.com/accessibility/

JAWS, a Windows screen reader, may not always correctly read the code examples in this document. The conventions for writing code require that closing braces should appear on an otherwise empty line; however, JAWS may not always read a line of text that consists solely of a bracket or brace.

This documentation may contain links to Web sites of other companies or organizations that Oracle does not own or control. Oracle neither evaluates nor makes any representations regarding the accessibility of these Web sites.