Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB) Weblog

Handcoding may look cheaper and quicker sometimes, but OWB gets you greater flexibility and lower costs over the long term.  This news item from ZDNet down under showcases an OWB customer winning big in a quick migration of their data warehouse from Oracle Database 10.2 to Database 11.1:

Retail distributor Metcash, owner of IGA distribution and IGA Fresh, this week revealed it had migrated to Oracle's Database 11g from 10.2g earlier this year.

The upgrade decision came as part of a wider data warehouse hardware consolidation program in late 2008, according to Carl Young, Metcash's technical lead for the project, with the company ditching its HP Superdome Unix servers for IBM P6 servers running the AIX operating system.

"I thought it best to roll up the two testing cycles into one and move on to the latest Oracle software," Young said of Metcash's motivation to upgrade to Database 11g.

…

The migration to 11g took a total of 12 weeks, while testing in Metcash's production environment with the systems running in parallel took six weeks. Metcash's 11g went into production in February this year.

Metcash's use of Oracle's programming tool Warehouse Builder, which automatically regenerated code from the source 10.2g database to the target 11g database, meant programmers weren't required for the task… Benefits to Metcash included reducing batch report production time, cutting out the use of Excel spreadsheets, and the ability to store more data online. Other performance benefits came from query caching, which helped avoid duplicating retrieval as well as the ability to make structural changes to the database without having to rebuild the "materialised database view aggregate" — a process that used to take 24 hours.

So… the takeaway: OWB made it easy to build a faster, more flexible data warehouse that leveraged the 11g database on a short schedule, with minimal development costs, low overall migration costs, and low project risk.

Oracle Magazine’s feature story, “Lead with Intelligence”, documents the successful experience of Oracle Exadata at Allegra Group, the largest e-commerce company in Eastern Europe. Warehouse Builder was selected as the ETL tool for this multi-terabyte warehouse project on Oracle’s most advanced data warehouse architecture delivering extreme data warehouse performance.

The HP Oracle Database Machine, announced at Oracle OpenWorld in September 2008, is a grid of eight database servers with 64 Intel processor cores running Oracle Database 11g and Oracle Real Application Clusters on Oracle Enterprise Linux. This data warehouse solution also includes a storage grid of 14 HP Oracle Exadata Storage Servers with 112 processor cores that’s connected to database servers over InfiniBand. …

In December 2008, Allegro Group deployed the HP Oracle Database Machine and began generating operational and statistical reports using Oracle Business Intelligence Suite, Enterprise Edition Plus. Allegro Group also created an interface to its existing systems using Oracle Warehouse Builder, a core component of Oracle Database 11g. Each day, Oracle Warehouse Builder automatically loads production data into Allegro Group’s Oracle data warehouse, which already holds more than 7TB of data on the HP Oracle Database Machine.

More at Oracle Magazine.

It can be tough to show the business value of data quality to stakeholders and sponsors you need to move a DQ effort forward. Dylan Jones over at Data Quality Pro offers some great advice on how to tune up your pitch so you can show decision-makers the impact of DQ across your business, and win the support you need.

There’s a lot to the post, but here’s a couple of key snippets:

Link the information chain to the service value chain. Probably the most powerful technique I have used for building the business case is to integrate a model of how the business drives value with the underlying data. By assessing the information chain that supports this service chain you can build a far more compelling story than simply measuring data quality in isolated data stores. Sponsors like to see that you are not just a data wizard but that you understand their business intimately.

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Don't use PowerPoint. I don't know if this is a coincidence but since I dropped it I have had far more success in winning proposals. Eliminating PowerPoint forces you to think of far more creative and engaging mediums.

Demonstrate a link from impacts to evidence using an interactive dashboard linked to data. I typically create a hybrid business model, data model and data quality model populated with full datasets. Using a data visualization tool to present the high level impacts we can then drill-down into the detail as the inevitable barrage of questions come your way…. The sponsors can also take the dashboard away with them to speak with their respective teams which is far more powerful than a PowerPoint file.

Read the rest here at Data Quality Pro.

While the formal sessions at Oracle Open World provide a lot of valuable information, sometimes the choicest nuggets turn up at the Unconference sessions, where Oracle employees, customers and partners can delve into the topics that interest them most in an interactive forum.

For OWB customers the best chance to see OWB 11.2 at OpenWorld will be an Unconference session conducted jointly by Oracle DW and BI guru Mark Rittman and data integration product manager Antonio Romero.

The real treat, though, will be the special guest appearance by OWB architect David Allan! Through this blog, David has become one of the public faces of OWB and his knowledge of how to get the most out of the tool has been invaluable to internal and external users.

Planned topics include:

• ODI-based code template mapping capabilities
• Integration of Warehouse Builder with OBI-EE
• Right-time Data Warehousing: CDC, Trickle-feed mappings

...but since we're in Unconference mode, we can do a little off-roading, time permitting, as the audience demands it.

Schedule details: Wednesday, October 14, Moscone West, Third Floor, Overlook II.

While this is a bit unstructured, it helps to have a preliminary headcount. To register, you'll need to take a second to join our LinkedIn Group if you haven't already. Click here to register!