Oracle DBA Guide to Data Warehousing and Star Schemas

Rating:
Summary: A Recipe for Success
Review: Allow me to bestow some well-deserved praise upon Bert Scalzo's terrific "Oracle DBA Guide to Data Warehousing and Star Schemas". A true gem - I won't go on another Oracle project without it.

What Bert provides here is nothing short of a clear and crisp recipe for success for implementing Oracle-based data warehouses. It fills in a much-needed area of dimensional data warehousing best practices, by describing precisely how to coax the best achieveable Oracle performance from dimensional data models.

I can't tell you how many projects I've been on where I've had to compromise physical data models in order to address perceived "shortcomings" in Oracle's ability to efficiently service dimensional queries. Using Bert's book on my most recent project, we followed his "recipe", and were able to consistently achieve the ideal query optimization plans and aggregate navigation behaviors - simply - without any of the usual hassles that I have (unfairly) come to associate with large scale Oracle data warehousing.

To data warehousing newbies I humbly suggest: pick up any one of Ralph Kimball's terrific texts on data warehouse design, and then if you are rendering it in Oracle, buy this book and follow its advice. The resultant system will be simple, powerful, and fast.

Bravo Bert - a great contribution to the field.

Jim Stagnitto
Llumino, Inc (www.llumino.com)

Rating:
Summary: A Veritable Gold Mine of Practical Hints and Tips!
Review: As an Oracle DBA transitioning from the OLTP world to the warehousing arena, I found this book enormously helpful. In a mere 200 pages, Mr. Scalzo has elaborated on an extensive range of data warehousing topics, including: star-schemas, dimension hierarchies, SQL-tuning, partitioning and parallel loading to name a few. His style is informative and direct; his examples are meaningful and clear!

This is a must-have book for all DBA's serious about designing and managing large-scale, lightning-fast data warehousing systems.

Rating:
Summary: A Veritable Gold Mine of Practical Hints and Tips!
Review: As an Oracle DBA transitioning from the OLTP world to the warehousing arena, I found this book enormously helpful. In a mere 200 pages, Mr. Scalzo has elaborated on an extensive range of data warehousing topics, including: star-schemas, dimension hierarchies, SQL-tuning, partitioning and parallel loading to name a few. His style is informative and direct; his examples are meaningful and clear!

This is a must-have book for all DBA's serious about designing and managing large-scale, lightning-fast data warehousing systems.

Rating:
Summary: awesome, pragmatic, authoritative, factual 9i DW book
Review: Bert has written a very good book that's full of real life empirical facts and experiences, mainly from building a vary vary large DW for 7/11. Bert does especially good job describing I/O, partitioning, spindles. His section on high speed / high volume data loader techniques is also very very good.

I have been leading / managing / directing / coding Oracle software development projects for 15 years for 3 Fortune 100 companies, and am both technical as well as "functional". Highly recommend Bert's book for DBA's, SA's, designers, programmers, technical project managers.

Rating:
Summary: Loosely coupled - arrogant attitude
Review: I am uninterested in the authors opinion on this and that. I do not need to be looked down upon because I made something that the author thinks is inappropriate or possibly ridiculous. What I am looking for in a profesional book is vision, possiblity, technique, option and positive experience.

When the author argues that 'just throw in as many as you need to keep your users happy' as he does for aggregates I loose my potential profesional respect for that author and put the book aside as untrustworthy. I know very well that I get an unwanted result because I am missing some possibly good points, but the simple nuiscense I get from reading the book leads me to other souces.

A final question: why would I need the proposed aggregates when I have materialized views? If anyone would like to answer my mail id is [e-mail].

Rating:
Summary: 200 pages of gold dust
Review: I think this book is exceedingly good.

The relevant, balanced,technical/commercial content backed by code and examples (Particularly the 1 page diagrams) presents Mr Scalzos unquestionable leadership in this field in a simple and unambiguous manner.

Mr Scalzo tells you EXACTLY how to design terabyte dwh databases with as fast as can be achieved response times.

Thank you sir, for telling me the facts.

Rating:
Summary: Don't use Oracle 7!
Review: Scalzo gives a chatty, informal exposition of tuning large data warehouses using Oracle software. He uses a strong conversational tone that makes such issues as star schema query optimisations straightforward to follow, under the assumption that you are already an experienced Oracle database administrator.

The book is independent of Oracle. What is unclear to me is how Oracle would regard this book. In several places, Scalzo describes the appallingly slow performance of Oracle 7 vis-a-vis Oracle 8i and 9i. He basically says that for certain tasks on large data sets, Oracle 7 was badly designed. No one who is currently using Oracle 7 will be thrilled to hear this. (Hee hee.) Cynically, one migh think Oracle 7 was overpromised and it underdelivered in some ways. But positively for Oracle, Scalzo gives typically much better results for 8i and 9i. An inducement to upgrade, if you have not done so already.

The biggest quibble about this book is the chatty style. Doesn't bother me. But it may perturb some of you, if you prefer a more "serious" timbre to the discussion of expensive design and deployment issues. If you can see your way clear past this, then the book may have merit in your DBA job.

Rating:
Summary: Pretty good if you can get past the attitude
Review: The book offers a number of detailed tuning tips and insights from Mr. Scalzo's real world experience. That being said, the tone of the writing is really annoying. Mr. Scalzo's condescending style is unnecessary and takes away from what could be a very good book. At points, I actually broke out in laughter at his arrogance. However, if you can get past the author's attitude the content of the book seems to be quite helpful.

Rating:
Summary: Pretty good if you can get past the attitude
Review: The book offers a number of detailed tuning tips and insights from Mr. Scalzo's real world experience. That being said, the tone of the writing is really annoying. Mr. Scalzo's condescending style is unnecessary and takes away from what could be a very good book. At points, I actually broke out in laughter at his arrogance. However, if you can get past the author's attitude the content of the book seems to be quite helpful.