data storage and management

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.

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 ...