“Oracle 10g Data Warehousing”

I've been meaning to post a plug for this one for a while. "Oracle 10g Data Warehousing" by Susan Hillson, Shilpa Lawande, Pete Smith and Lilian Hobbs came out a while ago and is the update to the 9iR2 Data Warehousing book that I talked about on my Books page. Although the 9iR2 book was good, I thought it was a bit thin and didn't really cover much that wasn't already in the manuals, however the 10g book is far more substantial and covers a lot of ground that you don't normally come across when going through the OWB, Discoverer and Oracle OLAP documentation. Like the 9iR2 book it covers all of the products that make up the 10g BI&W product stack, but what's good about this version is the degree to which it covers some of the stuff that you tend to gloss over when working with the tools - stuff like taking backups, using Enterprise Manager, using the new 10g features such as ASM - and as well has a big section on using the new analytic and aggregating functions (cube, grouping sets, rollup) that you get with 9i and 10g.

I'm usually fairly sceptical about printed books as there's not much you can't already get on docs.oracle.com and asktom.oracle.com; however in practice we've found this book invaluable and it's become standard issue on a number of big 10g data warehousing projects that we're working on. The only criticism I would say is that it only covers the first 10g release of the various tools - Discoverer, OWB etc - and doesn't therefore have anything on Discoverer "Drake" or of course OWB "Paris". Also, like every Oracle BI&W book, the coverage of Oracle OLAP is fairly sketchy, with nothing on the new 10.1.0.3 or 10.1.0.4 features, but of course that therefore leaves things open for my forthcoming magnum opus :-)

Funnily enough I was one of the technical reviewers for this book, as I stepped in at the last minute to tech review a couple of Pete Smith's chapters. Pete and I happened to be working together at the same client (for different companies), with Pete as the DBA (dropping and recreating tables) and me as the OWB developer (trying to keep OWB going with all my tables appearing and disappearing). One thing that struck me at the time was the amount of work that goes into writing a book - a typical blog article is for example an afternoon's work, say a day with the research and putting together articles - whilst a book chapter, at around 20-30 pages, and where you have to get everything just right, is a lot more effort. The other issue around book writing is the fact that the technical content has to be completely correct - I've experienced this now with writing for OTN, where articles are technically reviewed by the Oracle product team - and this review and revision process, whilst ensuring that content is absolutely spot on, certainly takes up a lot of time - as much time actually as the time it took to write the article in the first place.

Anyway, I'd thoroughly recommend the book, an excellent grounding in the technology and processes around building a 10g data warehouse, and an excellent introduction to 10g new features for those DW developers and DBAs up until now working with 8i and 9i.