Preface

Competing in today's world requires a greater emphasis on strategy, long-range planning, and decision making, and this is why businesses are building data warehouses. Data warehouses are becoming more and more common as businesses have realized the need to mine the information that is stored in electronic form. Data warehouses provide valuable insight into the operation of a business and how best to improve it. Organizations need to monitor these processes, define policy, and at a more strategic level, define the visions and goals that will move the company forward in the future. If you are new to data warehousing in general, and to Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) in particular, and need a way to get started, the Oracle Warehouse Builder is a great application to use to build your warehouse. The Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB) is a tool provided by Oracle that can be used at every stage of the implementation of a data warehouse right from the initial design and creation of the table structure to ETL and data-quality auditing.

We will build a basic data warehouse using Oracle Warehouse Builder. It has the ability to support all phases of the implementation of a data warehouse from designing the source and target information, the mappings to map data from source to target, the transformations needed on the data, and building the code to implementing the mappings to load the data. You are free to use any or all of the features in your own implementation.