Re: Data Warehousing Woes

Hi Michael

I've learnt a lot about Data Warehousing in the last three years. You should try reading some of the standard books by Inmon and co. In my humble opinion DW can be a bit difficult to grasp at the beginning because one is so clogged up with ideas of best practice, efficiency etc. I read some books, browsed the internet and tried to create a reporting database from our legacy system. It was only after sometime that the penny began to slide down the slot, that the questions I had to ask always were "what do I want?" and "how can I do it?" not "what should one want?" and "how should I do it?". The point is the theories only go so far. The project should have a strong focus. It needs to know what it wants to produce. Anyway ny advice would be for DW get one of the standard texts (the names escape me for the moment), read it, browse the web, visit another site where they already have DW and be prepared for a steep learning curve.

On the other hand it could be that your company is just trying to pool all its legacy data in one place and hence Oracle. The main objective being just to have the data in oracle. We have done something like this, but this is not data warehousing, it just a matter of data access really and is not very complicated.

Hi, well as our previous senior database dude has left the company and this has left basically just me to fend for the company's present db woes. Here's the scoop: We're going to soon be moving all of our logs and legacy databases into one massive Oracle database.  Seems to me like a real classic data warehousing / reporting project.

The problem? I'm probably between junior and intermediate level. There are (guessing here) 20 Gigs of data with many more gigs in the future. Now, I really enjoy working with Oracle and I would love to learn this but I know this is a bit over my head.

So my questions are:
1) Where the heck do I start to learn about data warehousing? Books, 3rd party tools, etc. 2) (serious question) How hard do I push for the company to go out and pay $1 billion for a couple of data warehouse consultants to at least help us with the design and architectural analysis?

Thanks guys,

MJ.

Author: Michael Johnson Received on Thu Jun 22 2000 - 03:01:34 CDT