Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2, previously known by the codename
"Paris", is now available for download on OTN. This is the long-awaited
release that adds support for things such as pluggable mappings, slowly changing
dimensions, data modelling of both relational and multi-dimensional objects,
data profiling, and many other new features.

An important change that’s come with this new release is that OWB is now
packaged as part of the database, rather than as part of the Business
Intelligence suite or Internet Developer Suite. As part of this move, the tool
has now been rebranded "Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2" (as opposed to
"Oracle Business Intelligence Warehouse Builder"), and with this re-packaging,
the licensing for OWB has now changed.

With this latest release of OWB, Oracle have divided Warehouse Builder
functionality into four parts.

• "Core ETL Features" corresponds roughly to the features that were in
  OWB10gR1 improved and extended, so that for example you can define and load
  analytic workspaces as well as relational tables. Improvements have been
  made to features such as name and address matching, the user interface, HTML
  metadata reporting and other areas. As from now, this core OWB functionality
  will be FREE with all of the latest database versions, Enterprise Edition,
  Standard Edition and Standard Edition One.
• "Enterprise ETL" is those new parts of OWB’s functionality that deal
  with enterprise-level ETL, such as handling transportable tablespaces, data
  pump, target load ordering, and the ability to install your repository on a
  RAC system. Other features within this part of the tool include enhancements
  to process flows, interactive lineage and impact analysis, access to
  user-defined objects. relationships and modules, automatic derivation of
  Discoverer business areas, and pluggable mappings. To use this
  functionality, you have to license the "Enterprise ETL" option to the
  Enterprise Edition of the database, at a cost of $10k per CPU.
• "Data Quality" covers data profiling, data auditing, audit ETL jobs and
  automatic corrections. This functionality will require the "Data Quality"
  option to the Enterprise Edition, at $15k per CPU.
• "ERP/CRM" connectivity is the connectors through to E-Business Suite,
  Peoplesoft and SAP. This is licensed at $20k per connector per platform.

When you install OWB 10g Release 2, you’ll have access to all of the
functionality, but like ADDM, AWM and the self-tuning functionality in the 10g
database, you can’t legally use it unless you license the appropriate database
options. You’ll have to also watch out for situations where you have an "ETL"
database that holds your design repository and has a couple of CPUs, but you
then deploy to a large data warehouse server with 16 or 32 CPUs - you’ll need to
install OWB on both servers to get the control center and repository on both
hosts, and you’ll therefore need to license OWB on both machines. With this licensing, it’s also worth bearing in mind that you don’t need the
Enterprise ETL option to just use data pump or transportable tablespaces, you
just need the license to use the OWB functionality that leverages these
features. To read the full details on the new packaging and licensing, take a look the “Oracle Database Licensing Information” document also now available on OTN.

Licensing aside, It’s great to see Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2
finally out in production. There’s whole bunch of new functionality included,
and handing of OLAP data is going to become a whole lot easier. Tasks such as
building slowly changing dimensions is now going to be a whole load easier, and
the data profiling feature will save a whole load of effort both in times of
staff required, and time it takes to build scripts, run them against the
database and then record it all using Excel - and of course you can
automatically generate corrections based on the contents of the profile. Keep an
eye out on OTN actually as I’ve got an article coming out very soon on just this
subject…

Anyway, you can download OWB 10g Release 2 here, and the documentation should be available on OTN shortly. I’ve also written a bunch of articles on the OWB 10gR2 "Paris"
beta over the last couple of years, that you can access here:

• 
  How OWB "Paris" Enables The OLAP Option
• 
  Building OLAP Cubes Using OWB "Paris""
• 
  Dimension Building Using OWB "Paris"
• 
  Asynchronous Hotlog Distributed Change Data Capture and OWB "Paris"
• 
  Using Data Pump and Transportable Tablespaces with OWB10gR2 "Paris"

Posted in Oracle Warehouse Builder |