Re: Data Warehouse Tools

• dmeng_at_focal.com on 04/02/02 12:03:27 -0800

> Hi All -
> This is for DBAs who have participated in a DW project: what kind of tools
> did you use for design, ETL, Query etc. I know Oracle has a data warehouse
> builder but it doesn't seem to be widely used. What is the most popular
> tools out there for DW construction and what is the trend?

Most of the ETL I design is done with Ab Initio, less often Informatica. Ab Initio is the best tool going for scaleable parallel processing and distribution across multiple nodes; Informatica has some advantages with lower throughput and messier metadata; its licensing is also simpler.

I tend to use Red Brick for data warehousing. Main reasons are offline loading of data, star and target indexes and much simpler data management -- mainly due to lack of rollback processing and ability to add phyisical storage without effecting data access.

Now that Oracle at least has partitioning it gets more usable for warehousing but still needs too much care and feeding, and doesn't support offline loads. For clickstream processing Oracle with partitioning is a nice combination.

In either case, DBI seems to be the most portable way to talk to various databases, especially for combining data from multiple sources (e.g., feeding selection criteria back from a Red Brick warehouse to an Oracle OLTP system).

enjoi.

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Steven Lembark                              2930 W. Palmer
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