Oracle DBA Guide to Data Warehousing and Star Schemas

• The definitive, real-world guide to Oracle data warehousing
• Maximizing performance, flexibility, and manageability in production environments
• Hardware/software architectures, star schema design, partitioning, and more
• Industrial strength data loading and query optimization techniques
• By the world-renowned architect of 7-Eleven's multi-terabyte datawarehouse

Oracle DBAs finally have a definitive guide to every aspect of designing, constructing, tuning, and maintaining star schema data warehouses with Oracle 8i and 9i. Bert Scalzo, one of the world's leading Oracle data warehousing experts, offers practical, hard-won lessons and breakthrough techniques for maximizing performance, flexibility, and manageability in any production environment. Coverage includes:

• Data warehousing fundamentals for DBAs--including what a data warehouse isn't
• Planning software architecture: business intelligence, user interfaces, Oracle versions, OS platforms, and more
• Planning hardware architecture: CPUs, memory, disk space, and configuration
• Radically different star schema design for radically improved performance
• Tuning ad-hoc queries for lightning speed Industrial-strength data loading techniques
• Aggregate tables: maximizing performance benefits, minimizing complexity tradeoffs
• Improving manageability: The right ways to partition
• Data warehouse administration: Backup/recovery, space and extent management, updates, patches, and more

Offering a radical approach for maximizing data warehousing performance and flexibility, this book teaches every aspect of designing, building, tuning, and maintaining star schema data warehouses using Oracle 8I and 9i. Scalzo (designer of 7-Eleven's multi-terabyte star schema data warehouse) explains the difference between a database and a data warehouse and encourages readers to let go of their Oracle DBA baggage and embrace seemingly outlandish concepts including creating bitmap indexes on every column of every table, and not normalizing database designs. Topics include the right way to partition, tuning ad-hoc queries for lightning speed, and industrial-strength data loading techniques. Annotation ©2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

BERT SCALZO is a product architect for Quest Software. As a member ofthe TOAD development team, he designed many of the features in the TOADDBA module. Scalzo has presented numerous papers on data warehousing andled or served on data warehouse special interest groups at Oracle eventsthroughout the past five years. He has worked for both Oracle Educationand Oracle Consulting, holds several Oracle Masters, a Ph.D. in ComputerScience, an MBA, and several insurance industry designations. Scalzodesigned 7-Eleven's multi-terabyte, star-schema data warehouse. He isauthor of The TOAD Handbook.