New Book
August 26th, 2005 by Peter Scott
I see that Digital Press is about to publish a book on Oracle Data Warehouse Tuning for 10g. I hope to pick up a copy of Gavin Powell’s book soon (even though it is not out in the UK for a couple of months) and maybe review it here.
The contents list looks interesting – if only because it is similar to the one I was thinking of for my proposed book :(
But being positive, it also means I was thinking of covering the right topics in my book – I’m sure that I would have a different slant on things to other authors
August 26th, 2005 at 1:56 pm
Yes, I’d noticed that one as well. Sounds interesting and Yes, I’d imagine you or David Aldridge could write something similar. I’ll try and pick a copy up when I go to Open World next month.
I’m still toying with the idea of writing a book on the OLAP Option, the problem is that I think it’d be a pretty small audience. Knowing my luck I’d end up being the domain expert on a product with exactly six customers…
August 26th, 2005 at 2:28 pm
Mark,
Well I for one envy you your knowledge of the OLAP option. I like the idea of implementing it even though I’d access it via a relational tool like business objects rather than an OLAP tool.
I’m sure that something from you on OLAP would go nicely in an Oracle data warehouse book … now if only there was someone who knew anything about Warehouse Builder around …
August 26th, 2005 at 2:40 pm
(note to self – improve typing)
Thanks Mark – I’m sure you would get at least 7 customers ;) No, you really should write something; there are a lot of people out there that want to use OLAP but are scared of getting started!
David, methinks that Mr Rittman could write that too!
August 26th, 2005 at 5:28 pm
Yes, I daresay he could, and that expands the potential readership to double figures.
Hey, just jokes mate!
August 26th, 2005 at 8:03 pm
Hi Pete, David
David, thanks for the comment about the OLAP Option. It’s a pretty cool technology actually, but pretty impenetrable to most people brought up on relational data warehousing. I work for a company who’s history is in Express, hence the crossover knowledge. The only issue with getting skilled up on it is that there’s practically no real production customers out there, at least there weren’t for 9i and 10gR1, I’m hoping it starts to gain a bit of traction with 10gR2 when it doesn’t require lots of patches to get it running.
WRT books – I actually got approached a while ago to do an OWB book, but the remit was for a beginners/manual replacement book, and I didn’t really see the point in rewriting the manual (and it’d be a pretty cynical exercise, not exactly fufilling). What I’d be interested in doing is the equivalent of what Pete’s talking about, something around best practices, optimisation and so on; that’d be interesting and would stretch my skills as well.
cheers
Mark
August 29th, 2005 at 1:45 pm
Another challenge to the adoption of OLAP is the difficulty of getting hold of the sample data used in the docs. I don’tunderstand why it can’t be made available without raising a tar to get hold of it.
August 29th, 2005 at 7:31 pm
Sounds like the three of you need to get together to write a collective work on data warehouses. That way it wouldn’t be a single book about OLAP, it would just be a couple chapters that get people going with it. Likewise on OWB. Then a few other chapters on performance and optimization, and a couple on warehouse basics and design issues.
Each section would be fairly independent, so the typical collaberation issues / pains would be minimal. And less of a time commitment to only write a third of a book each.